Teacher “Don’t give up, put all your soul into it!” he shouts. While the average human head weighs seven tons, it is seven tons hanging from a fragile neck in the ustrasana posture, the warrior modality of kundalini yoga. While trying to calculate how much Marta Sanz’s (Madrid, 1967) brain would weigh, the idea that came to my mind was barely planted on a small body where ideas against the system were sprouting like cobblestones. A torn speech with the same musicality that pops out of his dark eye to reality, emerging in a soft voice, and enriching his writing. He aired a hilarious dystopia in which his protagonists are single women and their drones are their guardians at the service of an intelligence of the underworld, rehearsing a new way of a fast-paced, programmed, forgetful, outdated narrative like every installment. The world you don’t like I washed all this down with a mockery, sometimes dark and sometimes funny, with the roaring sound (Anagram) of the suddenly falling metal shutters of the future. Her Ph.D. in Philology came to prominence in 2013 with the Daniela Astor y la caja negra (Tigre Juan, Cálamo and Estado Critico awards). Two years later she won the Herralde for Farándula. But on the way, he was about to leave it blindly, if it were not for the real ties that his literature had established for him, with the world, with the (other) world.
The title of the review is “Ethics and aesthetics”. Superficial aesthetic, but what is your ethical suggestion to the reader?
Ethical proposition in literature inevitably goes through a search for aesthetics. The great ethical, ideological, and political proposition of Metallic Shutters Suddenly Falling is this: At a time when we are thinning our language and thinking, and therefore our ability to feel and understand, there is another possible form of literature we must defend. emotional.. I offer readers a literary possibility that transcends a 1,500-word dictionary, and a vision beyond speed or how the story will end: not reducing everything literary to narrative. In turn, he presents texts through more baroque linguistic forms, where music is not the rattles that Juan Marsé speaks of but one more semantic layer. Language does not go in one direction and history in another, on the contrary, they have to unite in a duo.
Is it not, then, pure “conspicuous poetic justice,” as has been said before?
No, I do not think so. At this time, certain ways of writing or questioning truth through language eventually descend into obscurity, the unspoken; and, above all, they show all those preconceived forms of emotion that we take as common sense and which are nothing more than accumulated culture, ideology, issues that we take for granted and should not take.
“Bufa dystopia” baptizes the editorial. Is dystopian literature the alternative to these cryptic and fast times?
I don’t think this is the only source, there are so many ways to look at the truth… Dystopia seemed to me a way to go against the flow in times of these good feelings: I’m neither reactionary nor technophobic, but some bad uses of technology reduce our ability to concentrate and make our work. I have my eyes on your face and my critical feelings to watch it stretch to the limits of intolerable exploitation as they become intrusive and addictive formulas. For me, dystopia is a way to exaggerate through satire and talk about a gift I don’t like. I don’t think hope is built on sugar pills alone; sometimes it is made of cruelty and the most bitter laughter. If we don’t use that dark eye that writers sometimes have, we can remain encapsulated in a seemingly happy, self-satisfied world frozen in imaginary self-fulfillment.
Do consumption and big technologies, their “intrusive and addictive” products, push us to live the future without having time to enjoy the present? Don’t you feel – how fed up! – to rebel and cling to the present?
Some time ago, I wrote a sentence in a column: “The future is already here and it’s cool” (laughs), there are people who want to make legendary T-shirts. Neoliberalism’s need for everything to go fast and everything to be new every day, because it’s a sales strategy if it’s not boring. This has caused some generations to experience an early old age: The effort required by this forced and constant adjustment changes our perception of time. And also the sense of memory: we lose our memory capacity and store it in out-of-body memories that do not allow us to relate what happened with our life experience or have a logical and rational idea of progress. And all this makes post-truth possible: Why is Vox able to establish himself as the savior of the homeland? Because there is no memory and the past is fuzzy and unimportant. Conclusion: There is no awareness of the present in which one can act and transform reality.
For example, we talk freely about the metaverse, but do we really understand what it is?
They probably don’t understand what the metaverse is, even those who invented it. If the metaverse is what showcases everything everywhere at once, we are in the same traditional world as always, what have we become?
Are you staying with the previous one who at least appreciates the pleasure of slowness?
It is true that technology contributes a lot to the development of scientific and intellectual knowledge. But, on the one hand, we waste it with leisure that causes us to lose our depth and capacity for relationships: a world in which literature is impossible as the skills to appreciate a complex or highlighted text are lost. On the other hand, from a labor and economic perspective, hyperconnection makes us alienated beings, enslaves us and can take away many jobs in the medium term.
Shouldn’t we revolt? What’s going on with us?
We lose bodily perception. This means we can be extremely violent on networks – populism, spontaneity, anonymity: read Twitter – and vice versa, we can express our love in an overly big way – in a heartbeat that we would never do in person: WhatsApp -. We are lacking in size. We shouldn’t be overly concerned that machines can have emotions, become singular, but worry about how humans become dehumanized and allow ourselves to be dehumanized and deceived. For example, believing that the algorithm is ideologically aseptic or that when we use social networks it does not benefit anyone, and all this has to do with freedom and democracy. They’re watching us at every click. They force us to live in the same cycle all the time.
Do you have an idea of a reality as aseptic and burnt as your human characters convey in the face of the intelligence and precision of your drones?
The pandemic has made us very vulnerable, we have reduced our defenses against privacy theft through technology because we needed to work and communicate. This adds to the fact that we try to hide the idea of death, something closely related to screens in the horror genre: reflection within reflection is a metaphor for death, for the loss of the singularity, and that’s the flesh and the world we live in.
One dies alone, of course, but is it as lonely as it appears here?
I think we are creating weak links with hyper connectivity of networks. It’s a fantasy to think that you can talk to so many people anywhere in the world while you’re more immersed in yourself and not seeing what’s going on around you. I think we need strong ties, flesh, existence for both politics and love, but we are losing them. This loss can result in horrific experiences of loneliness that pose problems as sinister as child suicides: suicide is the second leading cause of death in this country. What kind of society are we building? Let’s lift the curtain for a while!
Isn’t the watchman and the guard plane a perverse dichotomy, a masking of the control we are subjected to?
This is what we do with technology: we are happy because if we get lost they will find us, but someone always knows where you are. People think they are too autonomous, but if they lose their cell phone, they die. We naturalized something that was against us years ago.
In his dystopia, drones stare at women. Would the kind of caretakers that no one cares about us gain anything, perversion aside?
The relations between women in this novel are not virtuous, but reflect that people are programmed by the ideology that we naturalize as common sense and permeate with macho behaviors that impose obligations: the woman who does not care is immediately selfish, and the woman who only cares is despicable because she has no role in public life and cannot be imitated, something paternal.
Can’t melancholic people educate young people, as is repeated in the novel?
Melancholy doesn’t sell well, isn’t photogenic on the nets, and is harshly repeated in the novel: It’s dangerous for them to pass that black bile on to the growing up. But I believe young people are too smart for this critical view to steal their momentum and joy. The worrying thing is there are young people who tell you, “I don’t know because I wasn’t born yet.” We create people who are incapable of valuing progress.
There are already around 200 literary titles declared to be written by ChatGPT, but how many do you suspect will be signed by humans and created by an AI?
Not the slightest idea. But there are already many highly projects done in half an hour with an artificial intelligence. What you’re asking is beyond my understanding and what I consider moral and ethical, and it leads me to think that we have a traditional and routine vision of fine art that escapes challenge because it doesn’t sell. An AI can imitate a poem, but which poem? AIs are epigones, suddenly taking on the default schemes of literary, musical, artistic, but what defines art is its ability to subvert all those guesswork, and in this break you ask yourself questions you’ve never asked yourself.
The US writers union has expressed concern, is there a reason for this?
This is another way of making cultural exchange more precarious and cheapening the notion of literature associated with the comfortable and repetitive, which will only numb us in our shitty lives.
What about philosophy, ethics, ethics…? Are philosophers sorely needed in business, politics, life, or is it just a dream for some?
Of course, humanists are needed, and we writers are like the little bird in the cage detecting a gas leak. [Kurt Vonnegut]but it is also true that there are people who apply politics with courage and want to change the world. I believe in politics, I don’t think it corrupts everyone.
“Literature is fun, of course, but it also reveals a way that affects your field of view, gaining clarity that can be painful, and ultimately being happier,” he told the Institute. London Cervantes. Do you still feel that expression reflected?
I wouldn’t change a single comma. Literature should provoke, rethink life. But in that undermined literature I’m implying, people get satisfaction and others make a lot of money by treating people as customers. Coming back to your first question: I don’t want to reproduce the gentrified literature that is always self-identified so that everyone feels comfortable everywhere, as in urbanism. We reproduce an original discourse in a literary field that should be about freedom.