Locked up at Oxford University to give the Weidenfeld Lectures at the end of the epidemic, Weidenfeld decided to dedicate these lectures to the passion that guided his life: fiction. As a battle card, in the style of his admired Mario Vargas Llosa (who, in The Truth of Lies, addresses a text with the same purpose of praising invented literary work), Translation of the World represents a retrospective cry of joy. The art that left its mark on the years: the art of fiction. The scream is a cry of joy, and it is retrograde, for the reasons he explains in this interview, fiction is now in danger in the universe that previously accepted inventions as the legitimate outcome of human dreams, while even inventions are now being surpassed. through the dangerous madness of political correctness. His final cry in favor of fiction is also an embrace of his ancestors, the writers who made invention a joy that no one can erase.
It also makes me want to do an interview with this book…
Hahaha. It is a tribute to fiction, to the activity of reading fiction, and it is also an expression of concerns about what fiction should be in today’s society, where cultural appropriations have occurred that prohibit a Dutch translator and white people from translating a poem. something written by a black American woman or prohibiting a male author from writing from a woman’s perspective. What we are experiencing is a new cultural conversation that makes us think about the health of fiction. Our society may be moving away from what we have sought for centuries in made-up stories. These stories are important; They have led to great discoveries that have made possible tremendous social achievements. I worry that this long conversation will be spoiled by prejudice this time.
What consequences does this phenomenon have on your generation or younger writers now?
I think there is a certain fear of entering spaces that are not ours. It seems that fiction being written now is measured by the standard of something called originality. Of course, this is very good on paper, but it is not legitimate to close the possibilities, to quench our thirst for adventure, to go to places you do not know, to research them and bring news. It’s impossible to get there, which has always made the best possible cut possible for me. Rather than embarking on something we don’t know, as if we needed a license for this adventure, we embark on something we can prove we know, as if verification is required to begin writing.
This is a reflection with which the book begins. You have studied the subject in great detail because your life depends on fiction.
This comes from a number of years related to the pandemic, where I talked a lot to the academic world in the United States, especially when I was teaching at Columbia University. I realized that writing there risked being subject to prior censorship. There was someone who was deathly afraid of the need to write a novel about a gay writer. I also met a photographer who had a beautiful collection of portraits; He didn’t know if he could photograph black men and women being attacked by police because the police might accuse him of exploiting the pain of others for his own gain. … Fiction is the essence of what I do, it is an act of moral imagination, not an act of wondering about the suffering of others, it is an attempt to live the lives of others and understand them better, not completely, but understand better… The cultural conversation currently rejects this possibility: not only with fiction To be free by dreaming and making fiction.
This undoubtedly affects the quality of writing and reading.
I don’t know. I think it puts limits on imagination. It is true that this can lead to poor quality of imaginative writing because our experiences as human beings are so limited. Moreover, the writer’s experience often tends to be very boring. So if you limit yourself to telling only what you know, if you cannot go from one to the other and research the other, you will often produce things that interest you the least. The reason I started writing was this: to discover that my own life was not enough. That having a life is not enough. Do you want to live more life? Want to understand more? Do you want to know what it feels like to kill a man without killing him? So make or read fiction. For example, read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Either you write, or they write to you…
Yes, as humans, I believe that fiction is where our drama is enacted and our lives do not satisfy us. We are not satisfied with the fact of having only one life, of living only once. And fiction is the only way we have discovered to remedy this deficiency.
So, this book was born from this belief.
The lectures I gave at Oxford grew out of this belief, and hence this book. These are questions about literature. What does fiction offer that we cannot find anywhere else? Fiction gives us what no one else has… Of course, these are sad questions because they come from questioning fiction. And this book is an implicit defense of fiction: If you are attacking the strange activity that human beings have developed, such as being interested in the lives of people who do not exist, then I will try to look for things to investigate. If fiction disappears, we lose. So in the book I specifically talk about a certain way of entering the past to understand the past, which is also a certain way of investigating the secret lives of others, which only exists in the fiction we are used to. With fiction we gain access to human secrets we should never know, and the dangerous turns out to be an indispensable part of literature, and for me, of knowing the past of others. I looked for that essence of fiction for the book.
What answers did you find to all your questions?
To address my anxieties without the anxious tone of someone seeing a vanishing world, I sought them out in the books I loved. find it valuable. I turned to Marcel Proust, León Tolstoy, my usual Latin Americans, Gabriel García Márquez or Mario Vargas Llosa. Since I was at Oxford when I was teaching the lectures, it seemed appropriate that I also turn to Javier Marías, who was very important to me and whose relationship with that university is very strong and well known. In short, I went to Oxford with a library of 10 basic books and tried to hold conferences from there.
When you were 50, you wrote a book similar to The Truth of Lies, which your teacher Vargas Llosa wrote in 1993, when he was just over 60. Are these parallels symbolic for you?
Yes, I think about them a lot. As an author who writes only about novels, Vargas Llosa has always seemed like a reference to me. He is also a very important name in my life and that book is a love letter to literature… By the way, I was 20 years old when I read Mario’s book, and then I read many of his books. Napoleon Bonaparte said that to understand a man, you need to understand what happened in the world when this man was 20 years old. Well, I read Vargas Llosa… Now, if I were to look at the books he wrote in my library, I’m sure that the year 1993 would be the date of discovery of his literature on the last page. A reference to the novelist I want to be. Then I read The Truth of Lies, Tirant lo Blanc, Perpetual Orgy…, they are all books about the art of the novel and they give an idea of what this book I am currently publishing is about. So the idea of my craft comes from the book contained in this book.
In your case, it’s about the maturity of reading World Translation…
That’s it. Books change as they mature. It happened to me in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And with Stendahl’s The Red and the Black. In this case, I read that novel when I was 20, and the difference between the two periods as a reader is huge. The book is another book, and the book knows that I have changed, so it comes back to me having transformed the discoveries I made then. Books explain your evolution in terms of love, friendship, religion or politics. Books always tell you how much you’ve changed, and that seems to me to be one of the great pleasures of rereading.
Then the truth of lies. Among all the things you read, which lie seduced you the most?
Maybe it refers to the lie that I decided to believe most passionately… I think I read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was 17. At that moment, what Franz Kafka said happened to García Márquez in The Metamorphosis happened to me. I thought: “Wow, if fiction can do this… fiction is a world I want to live in.” Then I began to believe everything they told me, and in these cases they told it to me in a very seductive way. It was like a dream that erased the boundaries of the world and threw people completely into fiction. The experience I had in my childhood happened to me for the first time in my youth.
So, which foreign book did you feel like you were living in?
To open you up to a space where you feel light, I think of Speech in the Cathedral or James Joyce’s Ulysses… These were the books I stayed to live with for a long time. I have been reading Joyce’s books with passion for 20 years, each chapter of Ulysses was a study, a struggle to grapple with the techniques Joyce used. It was a six-seven month reading experience. It was truly living inside a book, so when I first went to Dublin I was amazed to realize that I was living in that book and that city. I know Ulysses as if the book were a city.
You say that one of the main reasons why we continue to read and write novels is fascination, that as long as we continue to feel them, we will continue to be human, and the novel will continue to live…
That’s why I wrote this book… A letter to readers, like those reading this supplement, who think that literature is a place of meeting and humanity in a world that is becoming less human and more narcissistic. Literature is a field that denies narcissism. It is an act of faith, an exercise in curiosity about the other, a journey towards the other. As long as these characteristics of man are kept alive, literature will also live. And if fictional literature, as I see it, disappears, it will be because we have become less human. And this is no longer impossible. This is a possibility.
Long live fiction.
Exactly the same. Long live fiction!