While it may be believed that the horror genre is not the genre favored by the majority of readers, Enríquez’s work is impressive for its wide influence. A few weeks ago, Sheridan traveled to Madrid to receive the Le Fanu award and took the opportunity to present his new book, The Other Side. Portraits, fetishisms, confessions (Anagram). Edited by journalist Leila Guerriero, the volume brings together almost all of Enríquez’s journalistic work. These are articles she wrote with an educated pen on music, literature, and cinema, with personal and funny confessions about her period of writing, her decision not to become a mother, or her phobias, which have been published in various media for decades. , among other subjects. We had a lively conversation in a bar on Gran Via, despite the disco music that was too loud for eleven on Monday morning. Mariana Enríquez not only shines across genres with her powerful writing, she’s also a terrific conversationalist.
She commented that she didn’t know how to create female narrators at the beginning because of a lack of reference. What was it like when this sound came out?
At first I thought it would be easy to use a female narrator because I am a woman, but I realized that literary language has nothing to do with experience. At most it would have helped if I had given specific details such as having had a mammogram or having a period, but in any case it was necessary to construct the scene in a literary way. In part, it had to do with her little reference to female narrators. Even in the works of writers like Patricia Highsmith, Iris Murdoch, or others, the vast majority of narrators—not to mention the authors—were men at the time. In any case, I could look at Natalia Ginzburg, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, but they are not my style, they have served me to a certain extent.
Are there any particular current societal impositions, such as harassment, abortion, motherhood, that writers need to address?
Certain subjects have a fashion because one might want to cover them, but not necessarily in literature. Like networks, there are other social planes on which to apply it. Fashion isn’t necessarily a bad thing, what I don’t like is the expectation that any writer should be interested in these topics. If there is a conquest as a writer, it seems to me that the problem is to be able to talk about what everybody wants, but it’s a necessity. Just as it is a problem to have to think so much about identity issues or what offends and what doesn’t. I don’t see it as a healthy thing to have in literary conversation.
Could it be that touching the agenda items in the environment opens more doors?
I was a judge at the Sitges film festival, and I noticed that in many movies, the pregnancy theme is a horror trigger. I wondered if many female directors were considering writing an agenda script for good reason, for the simple reason that they would more easily approve. What if the woman in question doesn’t want to talk about it? This is an important limitation.
And where do you detect that this limitation specifically occurs?
For example, there are some British publishers that use a sensitivity reader in the so-called cancellation framework, i.e. a person tasked with detecting potential complications in a book. Let them know if there are any female characters, if one of them shouldn’t act a certain way, if it’s preferable not to kill a trans character to dislike it, if it’s okay to diversify and not put it all white. skinned characters etc. I even know that some writers specifically recruited these readers to avoid these inconveniences after receiving such criticism on different social networks.
What if we like the works of an author whose ideology we do not agree with?
I disagree that an author fails because his ideology is different from mine. I love Flannery O’Connor even though he’s so racist. This does not mean that I communicate with him and can choose not to read, but this knowledge anyway allows me to read him in context, to understand his literature in the light of his time and thought.
In other words, shouldn’t the author’s personal life distract us from his production?
Especially if some of the author’s ideas are not confirmed in his work. Céline was extremely Nazi, and if you read Journey to the End of the Night, what you realize is a deep human hostility that, in her case, led to Nazism. In short, this is not a Nazi book. Then again, I’m a generation before this issue of the current cancellation. In that sense, I always knew William Burroughs killed his wife, and it struck me as fatal, but that didn’t stop me from reading. Still, it’s also true that, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, which is more extreme for these analyses, some authors put out a book in which they said something that offended a particular community, and then had to deal with a lynching on the networks. It seems to me that far from opening the conversation towards identity and diversity, what it does is discipline, it takes away originality.
His work has a strong social context. Does literature have a social duty?
I am interested in literature that records the social of any kind, not so much encapsulated literature without observing the environment in which it lives. There are certainly ways of life that we ignore, that we are indifferent to, and it has to be so because we can’t empathize with everyone or living in the city means seeing things you can’t stop. Let’s say people living on the street are a sight we see every day and we can’t help everyone. But this look, these reflections, how each treats indifference or privilege over the others builds you up as an individual. This is thinking about yourself in society, and it helps you look at yourself from the outside as well. I don’t see it as a separate thing that definitely constitutes the sociopolitical person, especially from Argentina and Latin America. That’s why I’m interested in talking or writing about it.
Even though Our Piece of Night is such an intense, complex and dark novel, do you think it has reached so many readers who perhaps don’t read terror?
I honestly have no idea, and I’m also surprised a lot of people are reading this in a pandemic. When it was published at the end of 2019 and the pandemic started right away, I thought the book would not have a wide readership because no one would want to read something so dark. However, there were those who told me that it served to transport them to another world. Perhaps there is an excessive amount of autobiographical fiction right now, and some readers are looking for that literature that tells you something serious and intense, but not first-person. I’m not wrong, but the self-written text imposes a vision, leaving less room for reader participation.
What do you think of the debates around autofiction?
I am interested in the autobiographical in the work of other authors; Not mine, because talking about myself in the first person makes me laugh and embarrass, especially if it’s something serious I have to dramatize. For this reason, I use humor more in my non-fiction works. Every literary work has many autobiographical elements, only in some cases like mine they are distorted, coded, placed in a character of the opposite sex, the traumatic seem hidden. I can use the first person but in a broader context, as in the book about cemetery tours, where I am not the protagonist, as in cemeteries and stories, there I am just my guide, the one with my back turned. It needs to be seen from a more journalistic perspective.
In your case, can we talk about three rhythms of writing: novels, short stories, journalism notes?
The night part took me two years. It usually takes me longer to think about a novel, like telling me a movie for a year, at least I write a few things and then quickly put them down on paper. I think it is appropriate to write stories in one go, in one day, at most two days, because it is necessary to maintain a certain tension. Later, I can spend a lot of time fixing them. For both genres, I usually design the whole plan in advance before I start writing, but as the novel takes unpredictable paths or stretches over time, you find daily synergies that affect you or provide you with data. The novel, as a genre, is unyielding. I decode notes very quickly at this point.
In a note, she said she liked having young people read to her. Can you write for them?
I believe that these categories also produce limitations in the world of reading. We have the idea that after early youth one no longer reads gothic or horror or science fiction, but that the adult should read something else. I don’t understand such barriers. A book played by a teenager is Lolita, and no one gives it to teenagers to read. Adolescence, on the other hand, is very useful for the kind of literature I do, because it’s that somewhat monstrous moment in people’s lives: your body, your voice, and your personality change, it’s a metamorphosis, and there are few records. this. So sometimes, when I want to represent more extreme changes in a character, adolescents are helpful to me because they’re being built, they’re less connected, and they’re less of this world. They are more volatile, have strange hobbies, have sudden cycles. It is a short, intense and easily forgotten period. It seems unfair to me that it is even the most difficult phase of the training sessions to be underestimated; instead there is a super idealized image from childhood. I like to include both young people and children in my novels.
If music fascinates you, why do you think poetry is not a suitable genre for your literature?
I don’t make music for the same reason: it turns out bad. Likewise, I feel like I still have time. I read a lot of poetry and even desire to learn more about composition, structure, rhythm. But the truth is, I respect him a lot and I think it has to be some kind of gift to do it well. I’m not ignoring this, I have to find my poetic voice different from the narrative voice. Maybe it will come at some point.