The extraordinary thing about Shakespeare is that we don’t even notice the often enigmatic nature of his words, which don’t get in our way when it comes to ‘understanding’ what we’re reading. They don’t slow us down, they don’t appear cryptic or abstruse. We have a sense that we’re capturing everything he says without any difficulty at all. And yet, if you stop and re-read, if you look closely, you often find that while you may have ‘understood’, you haven’t entirely ‘comprehended’. The energy, the rhythm, the glow of his images and metaphors, all drive us on, and create in us an illusion of intuition, revelation, or even sudden wisdom. Then, when you emerge from the wave and look back, you realize that there is still much to explore, to develop, to puzzle over and think about. What further encouragement does an author need to write a little more?
(2016)
Roving with a Compass
I’m afraid to say this, but something I lack entirely is any vision of the future. Not only do I not know what I want to write, I don’t even know where I want to get to, I don’t even have a narrative plan I can propose before or even after my novels have been written; indeed, when I begin a novel, I don’t even know what it is going to be about, what will happen, or who the characters will be or how many, let alone how it will end. I suppose one of the reasons for this is that, having reached the age of forty and with ten or eleven novels to my name, I feel as if I have passed through at least three very different stages, although this feeling may also be due to the anxiety aroused by my having started to publish very young, when I was only twenty, and to the changes everyone goes through from early youth to maturity.
The fact is that I continue to write rather aimlessly and could never honestly say: ‘In this novel I was trying to reflect …’ I envy writers like Balzac and Carlos Fuentes, who both knew what they wanted the totality of their life’s work to be. There are others who would not go quite that far, but whom I envy just as much, because, although they restrict themselves to one text at a time, they nevertheless know, right from the start, what they want that book to be and what they intend to write about. They are writers who are, in a way, working with a map, and before they set off, they already know the terrain to be crossed, and off they go, confident that they have the means to reach their goal. On the few occasions when I have mapped out my trajectory beforehand (at most, in the occasional short story), I had the feeling that I was simply writing down what I already knew, which bored me, and boredom is the last thing a writer should feel.
I suppose I work with a compass rather than with a map, and not only do I have no idea what my goal is or what I want to write or what I’m going to write about, I also have no idea about the presentation, to use a term that can cover both what we usually call plot, argument or story as well as the book’s formal, stylistic or rhythmic appearance or indeed structure. Feeling one’s way forward like that is, I suppose, very dangerous, and usually has catastrophic results. If it has proved to be not quite such a catastrophe in my case, I would like to think this is due to a strange and possibly unnecessary discipline I impose on myself, namely, I do not allow myself to change what I have written as it suits me or as I find out – exactly like the reader – what the novel is about or what is going on; instead, I force myself to be ruled by what I have already written, and allow that to determine what happens next. In a way, I apply to a book the same principle of knowledge that rules life, reality or the world, or whatever you choose to call it: we cannot behave or decide or choose or act according to a known goal or to what might happen later: rather, that goal or subsequent event will have to be ruled by what we have already experienced or known or suffered, none of which can be erased or changed or even forgotten.
This not-knowing allows me to indulge in what I would call roving (although, in my case, I think such roving is only apparent), which, oddly enough, is frowned upon by most critics nowadays, who, doubtless brought up on detective fiction, give great importance to what is ‘pertinent’ or ‘essential’ to the story, as if everything that appears in a narrative should provide useful information that will lead the reader to the inevitable denouement. Barthes talked about l’effet de réel to describe the things, details or episodes that happen or occur simply because they do, both in life and in novels, but whose only significance or connection to a story is the one that the author or the reader chooses to find by using his or her associative faculties. Cervantes or Sterne or Proust or, among more modern writers, Nabokov, Bernhard or Benet were masters of that textual roving, or, if you prefer, masters of the digression, the tangent, the aside, the lyrical invocation, the rant and the prolonged autonomous metaphor. None of them, however, could be said to be doing this gratuitously, nor could it be said that their digressions were not ‘pertinent’ or ‘essential’ to the story. Indeed, it is that taste for digression that makes their stories possible.
In my last novel, A Heart So White, I discovered (but only once I had finished it) that it was about secrecy and its possible usefulness, about persuasion and instigation, about marriage, about the responsibility that comes with knowing something, the impossibility of knowing anything and the impossibility of not knowing, about suspicion and speaking out and keeping silent. But I only know all this because while I was writing, as happens when reading the authors I mentioned earlier, I found myself obliged to pause for some diversion or digression or aside – my interest as a writer is not very different from my interest as a reader – and, as such, I want to be obliged to stop and think, and while this is happening I really don’t mind what the writer is telling me. After all, what is tellable in a novel is simply what could also be said in a few, interchangeable words. Novels, however, tend to have a lot of words and those should never be interchangeable.
(1992)
Who is Who?
When I wrote my novel All Souls (1989), I found myself in a situation entirely new to me as an author, one I had not encountered when writing any of my five previous novels. All Souls is set in Oxford, where I, as narrator and protagonist, had recently spent two years. It was written in the first person, a first person who, admittedly, bears a strong resemblance to the ‘I’ in the letters I wrote to my friends in Spain during my stay in England. The narrator of the novel held the same post or position that I had held then, and lived in a house identical to the one in which I had lived. Some of the other characters in the book have something in common with people I met in Oxford, although none is actually ‘portrayed’ in All Souls, by which I mean they are not clearly identifiable. To give one example, the physical appearance of the character called ‘Toby Rylands’ or ‘the literary scholar Toby Rylands’ corresponds almost exactly to that of a retired professor with whom I was on friendly terms during my time there. However, that is as far as any resemblance goes. The character has some points in common with him and with another old gentleman whom I was fortunate enough to know during his latter years, the poet Vicente Aleixandre, but as for what ‘Toby Rylands’ says (his longest speech in the novel is a monologue he gives during a conversation he has with the narrator), I can state categorically that neither the retired Oxford professor nor Vicente Aleixandre ever said those words: they are as much my own invention as those spoken by any of the characters in my previous novel, The Man of Feeling (1986).
I realize that this mingling of things actually experienced and things imagined or invented is not so very unusual; indeed, it is probably the basis of most novels past and present. And yet the experience nonetheless took me by surprise: I had never before had recourse (except in minor details) to anything I had seen or heard or known in order to build a novel on it. I had certainly not done so knowingly, and that, of course, was precisely what I had to do in All Souls. At the same time, right from the start, I knew that what I was writing was a novel and not an autobiographical account or a personal memoir of past events, even when some of the episodes in the novel did approximate to my own experiences. (It should be said that the title of the book in its French translation is Le Roman d?
??Oxford, with the emphasis on the word ‘novel’, and I had considered that same title, La novela de Oxford, for the original Spanish version.)
And so when it came to creating my characters, I found that, unlike in my other novels, in which the origin of all the characters had been the same (namely, my imagination), in All Souls, the characters had various origins. And even though the way each of them was configured would constitute a unique and isolated case, the characters, as regards origins, were basically of three types, namely: (a) entirely invented characters, as in all my previous novels; (b) a historical character (the writer John Gawsworth); and (c) characters to a greater or lesser extent inspired by, or, rather, to a greater or lesser extent related to real people.
I won’t comment on the characters in the first category, the most important of whom would be the one called ‘Clare Bayes’, since the only new problem presented by such characters was that of making them fit and blend in on the same undifferentiated plane as those with a different provenance. Nor will I comment on the writer John Gawsworth, since my treatment of him was complex enough to require another essay like this or even a whole book. As for the third group, to which belong the aforementioned ‘Toby Rylands’ and various others, I will focus on the most striking and most problematic one, that of the Narrator, to whom I will also sometimes refer as ‘the Spaniard’, since that is how he is occasionally referred to in the book.
As I say, there were so many similarities (those that can be verified) between the situation of that character and my own that it seemed to me absurd to try to camouflage them. I gave no physical description of him nor did I give him a name (that is, I decided to maintain an ambiguity that would have been impossible had the Narrator said of himself that he had red hair and was six foot three or, on the contrary, had dark hair and was five foot seven; or if he had said that his name was Juan or Pedro or even Javier). In addition, I decided not to create a fictitious or an artificial voice for him, as was the case with the voice of the character called ‘The Lion of Naples’, the narrator of The Man of Feeling. Here, I made no attempt to avoid using my own voice, that is, my natural diction when writing, the same voice, for example, in which I had written to friends when I was in England. And yet, even though I was lending my own voice and some of my experiences to that character – the Narrator or the Spaniard – I knew that he wasn’t me, but someone different, albeit similar. Or, if you prefer, you could say that the character was ‘the person I could have been, but wasn’t’.
I won’t deny that, when I began writing All Souls, that distinction was not as clear to me as it is now that the book has been finished and published and is out of my hands; and it may be that the opening sentences in the novel express a desire to make clear to myself, right from the start, that problematic distinction:
But in order to speak of them, I must speak of myself and of my time in the city of Oxford, even though the person speaking is not the same person who was there. He seems to be, but he is not. If I call myself ‘I’, or use a name which has accompanied me since birth and by which some will remember me, if I detail facts that coincide with facts others would attribute to my life, or if I use the term ‘my house’ for the house inhabited by others before and after me but where I lived for two years, it is simply because I prefer to speak in the first person and not because I believe that the faculty of memory alone is any guarantee that a person remains the same in different times and different places. The person recounting here and now what he saw and what happened to him then is not the same person who saw those things and to whom those things happened; neither is he a prolongation of that person, his shadow, his heir or his usurper.
These words, which occur in the very first paragraph, are undeniably part of the novel, since they are placed in the mouth of the Narrator, who will be the person telling us what happens next. And yet it’s highly likely that, when they were being written, those words were ‘still’ mine, the author’s, and that it was then, through those words, that the author took his leave (or took the opportunity to leave), allowing the Narrator, the Spaniard, to take the floor. Insofar as I can say what I’m about to say, I think that I needed to intervene in my narrator’s text that first time so that I could then cease to intervene. In other words, I needed to establish explicitly that difficult separation and to distinguish between ‘the person now describing what he saw and what happened to him’ and ‘the person who actually saw it and to whom those things did actually happen’, and thus deny that they are one and the same. However, I fear that this distinction or differentiation, based on the commonplace idea that none of us is the same all the time except – possibly – as regards memory and name, was not enough for me entirely to take my leave, to exclude myself, Javier Marías, from the text and from the narrative. That is why I added: ‘neither is he a prolongation of that person, his shadow, his heir or his usurper’. This, more than the previous sentence, was my real leave-taking, and granted me the necessary freedom to be able to recount events with the same or customary impunity and impertinence as an entirely fictitious or, as I said before, artificial narrator. Curiously, and possibly quite by chance, those words are true, I think, precisely because it is impossible to know who wrote or is writing them, the Narrator or the author, because they were/are written by them both.
The fact is that once I had established (for myself, the author) that separation or distinction between author and Narrator, I felt free not only to lend the Spaniard my own voice or my usual written style, but also to allow myself to disguise him as me, at least as regards incidental, secondary matters. An example: the Narrator mentions his childhood and recalls how an old nanny used to walk with him and his three brothers down the streets ‘of Génova or Covarrubias or Miguel Ángel’. I do, in fact, have three brothers, I was born in Calle de Covarrubias and spent my early years there, I went to school in Calle de Miguel Ángel and used to go to the cinema in Calle de Génova. The Narrator’s birthday is said to be 20 September, which happens to be my birthday too.
This disguise – which I could quite legitimately adopt given the frank disclaimer quoted above, dissociating myself from the Narrator – was, however, after a hundred or so pages, becoming a double-edged sword. The Narrator, whom I earlier defined as someone who could have been me, was beginning, if I may put it like this, to be unmistakably me, when – or so I thought – with the words ‘neither is he a prolongation of that person, his shadow, his heir or his usurper’, I had made it clear that the Narrator was No One, and could therefore be Anyone. To my way of thinking, the fact that the Narrator was neither my prolongation nor my shadow, my heir or my usurper (nor his) granted the Narrator, right from the start, absolute autonomy, so much so that I could allow him to borrow my attributes as well as glimpses of or images from my past without running the risk of me becoming confused with him. It’s difficult to be confused with someone who is, in fact, No One. Now, all this was as seen from the point of view of the author, of the person doing the writing, of myself while I was writing. From that point of view, the above-mentioned words helped me either to treat myself as a fictional character (which would fit that other formula ‘the person I could have been, but wasn’t’) or, you might say, to treat a fictional character as if he were me (which would fit the formula ‘the person who is No One, and yet resembles me’). This new problem arose precisely because of the growing resemblance between this person who was No One, or who quite simply wasn’t, and me. And here, the point of view of the author, of the person doing the writing, of me while I was writing became relegated to the background. I became aware that, although that point of view was important and vital to how I approached my task as novelist, namely, the execution or creation of the story, it only partially resolved what the reader’s perception of that character, the Spaniard, might be. That ‘declaration of principles’ given in the first paragraph could be forgotten by the reader and set aside once the story proper had begun, and might, consequently, lack weight, effect and value from the reader??
?s point of view. The biographical note on the jacket stating that the author ‘taught Spanish literature at the University of Oxford for two years (1983–85)’ could lead the reader – and not just a reader who actually knows the author, but an unknown, anonymous reader – to see that initial ‘declaration’ as a mere rhetorical device and to transform me, the author, into the Narrator. Such an assimilation or identification (or a tendency towards that) was and continues to be almost inevitable, but the fact that the Narrator was disguised as me and had many of my characteristics meant that even though the Narrator wasn’t me, if he were to be someone, he could only be me, rather than No One or Anyone, or, at the very least, Someone-else-plus-me, as had been my intention. And so, at a given moment, I needed (more from the reader’s point of view than the author’s) an alibi, something that would allow the Narrator to at least be Someone-else-plus-me, or, in other words, not necessarily me (by which I mean a fictitious ‘I’, but not necessarily that fictitious ‘I’).