Javier Cercas: The Perils of War and Fame
By Carlos Rodríguez Martorell -- Críticas, 8/1/2005
The new Spanish narrative has in Javier Cercas an indisputable referent. The publication of Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis) in 2001 was one of the literary events of the past years. Besides winning several awards, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004, which is awarded by the Arts Council of England, the novel was translated to more than 20 languages, sold over one million copies, and was turned into a film by famed novelist, screenwriter, and director David Trueba.
| Books by Cercas |
Cercas, who is also the author of the short story collection El móvil (The Mobile, 1987) and of the novels El inquilino (The Tenant, 1989) and El vientre de la ballena (The Whale’s Womb, 1997), reveals, in this telephone interview, the obsessions that have driven him to write about "the reality of evil" and the stupidity of success, and welcomes the renewed interest in Spain for Latin American literature.
You defined La velocidad as the "reverse" of Soldados de Salamina. War is the backdrop for both novels, but while Soldados is a story of redemption, La velocidad deals with absolute evil and with the impossibility of forgiveness, or of forgetting. What motivated you to write this latest novel, and how do you explain this evolution?
What you have said is very precise. La velocidad is a type of complement to Soldados. This happens to me with all my novels; in a way, the novels I write either rebut or complement my previous works. And, as you said, Soldados speaks of the possibility of good, while this one speaks of the reality of evil and the impossibility of redemption.
My novels come from obsessions or, better said, from perplexities. I usually start off with an image, which in the case of Soldados, is that of a man who must kill another but doesn’t. In La velocidad, the image is much simpler: a Vietnam veteran whom I actually met while working at the University of Illinois at Urbana, was sitting on a bench, watching some kids play ball. I asked myself: "What does that man’s look hide? What is he doing there?" That image, which refers to Rodney Falk’s character, was the starting point of the novel. Most writers, or at least myself, don’t have motivations before writing a book. I decide to write a novel to solve a question that I have asked myself, and as I write the novel, I begin raising moral, political, and other type of issues.
You’ve claimed that Susan Sontag encouraged you to write about the Vietnam War. Tell us how this happened.
Well, I had read a lot of Sontag’s works. I was especially interested in her essays, and as a matter of fact, one about her trip to Hanoi was pivotal to this novel. When Bloomsbury published Soldados in English in 2003, Sontag wrote a highly favorable quote for the edition, and that started an e-mail correspondence between us. Then, Sontag came to Barcelona and we met for dinner. She asked me if I was writing something and I told her about La velocidad. I was full of doubts, as I guess most writers are while writing a novel, so I said: "One of my most basic worries is that I’m writing a story about a Vietnam War veteran, even though I’m not American." She looked at me intently and said, "That is exactly the reason why you should tell this story! Precisely because your view is foreign to ours, and it can be interesting." I think Sontag was right. My nationality in no way affects the issue in question. In the end, La velocidad is not only about Vietnam; the novel’s moral implications could apply to different circumstances and settings.
The University of Illinois at Urbana, where you once taught, is the setting of both La velocidad and your 1989 novel, El inquilino. What do you think of the United States?
I must say that I was only in the States for two years, and in a small college town in the Midwest. Working at the University of Illinois was a very decisive experience for me. During my stay, I understood that the States is a very complex country, more so than what we tend to think of it in Europe. It has the unique virtue of being very hospitable because unlike in [Spain], where families have inhabited the same lands for centuries, in the States no one really belongs to the country. So, as soon as you get there, you feel like everybody else; like you are part of the community. Living in the Midwest allowed me to understand things about the States that would have been hard to grasp if I had lived in a great city like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. There, I witnessed the very conservative side of the States, which is precisely why I am interested in a character like Rodney Falk. Falk comes from a very conservative and traditional background, and personalizes the feelings some Americans have of being the good guys, of always being right because they saved the world from Nazism, Fascism, and Comunism. Falk also personlizes how the war in Vietnam shattered these ideals. For his generation the war was like a loss of innocence, a discontinuity of the American dream.
In terms of your writing technique, in La velocidad, as in all of your previous works, the narrator is easily identifyable as your alter ego, despite some tricks to disorient the reader. Is it your objective to make the reader doubt the truth in everything they read, or just the opposite?
Novelists aim at persuading their audience that what they are reading is true. That’s been their fundamental objective since the birth of the novel; since Cervantes. For instance, Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe as if it were a chronicle, as if the story had really happened. This feeling of veracity, this impression that the story is not only simple entertainment, are fundamental to me. In La velocidad I tell my audience that they are reading fiction. But then, I unveil the mechanisms of the novel and speak about them throughout. I invite my readers to join me in the process of writing the novel. So on the one hand I tell them, "this is a novel," and on the other, "this is completely true; this has happened to me and it could happen to you." It is all about shaking the reader’s concience. A novelist must entertain and involve the reader, but his or her ultimate goal should be to make the reader see the world in a different light.
La velocidad can be read as an essay on how to write a novel. One of the strongest points that Falk’s character makes is the importance of who writes the novel, in this case the narrator. Is this a theory you apply to your writing?
Absolutely. The fundamental lesson when telling a story is always who tells it. Whoever tells a story decides which facts to divulge or hide, and which to partially reveal. Choosing the narrator is always the fundamental decision: whether he/she is objective, or a third person, or omniscient, or someone involved in the story, as is the case here.
La velocidad also deals with the weight of fame, in this case how it affects a successful writer. Why did you explore this theme?
Because it was necessary for the novel. I personally lived the weight of fame with Soldados and I needed to reflect on that. Success can be a stupendous thing depending on how one defines it. If it means to write the best book one can ever write, then it is a great experience. Now, if we define triumph in terms of its social dimension, that is, to have a great deal of readers, then success can be literally, catastrophic. When Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize, he exclaimed, "My God, what a catastrophe!" There are thousands of writers who’ve been stupefied and destroyed by fame. I wanted to write about this because I needed it and because nobody else wants to talk about it. They don’t want to sound like they’re saying, "the rich also cry." Ultimately, I think that a writer’s success is foolish. Writers are not famous; Ronaldo or Shaquille O’Neil are famous.
According to Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, the huge gap between Latin American and Spanish literary production has gotten smaller. He has claimed there is a thematic and stylistic resonance between the recent work of a series of Spanish authors, including yourself, and that of such Latin Americans as César Aira, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Rodrigo Fresán. Do you agree?
Yes. Latin America’s literary boom during the ‘60s and ‘70s encouraged Spain to begin paying attention to what was being created in that continent. But during the ‘80s, this interest in Latin America waned. The work of Latin American writers rarely reached the Spanish market, and, at the same time, there was a lot of epigonism; a mini boom of sub-García Márquezes, sub-Vargas Llosas, etc. Today, we’re living a period of more communication. As Bolaño has said, Latin American and Spanish writers are doing similar things, and Latin American writers are producing very high-quality works. Also, Spain’s publishing industry has begun to publish Latin American writers. Even if they’re not super successful in terms of sales, people are still interested in their books, and are learning from them.
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Carlos Rodríguez Martorell is a Spanish editor and journalist living in New York City.
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