“writing is an act of free choice”
Interview by Lucía Iglesias Kuntz
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A non-stop novelist Like his hero, the detective Pepe Carvalho, Manuel Vázquez
Montalbán (born Barcelona, 1939) looks upon himself as taking a walk through
history. Considering his wide-ranging and varied literary output, a journalist was
not entirely wrong when he jokingly said, “With Vázquez Montalbán,
no sooner have you finished reviewing his last novel than the next one is already
in the bookshops.” Montalbán readily admits that he is a workaholic and that
he has written more than he has lived. “One day I shall have to stop writing in order
to remember how to live,” he once told an interviewer. |
Barcelona is like a character
in Montalbán’s novels.
discusses such serious topics as society, politics, his craft–and why he writes detective novels
• Did you know there are over 200 entries for Manuel Vázquez Montalbán on the search engines of the Internet?
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: I only knew of two pages on the Internet. One of them made me out to be an Italian and the other an American of Galician extraction called Colmeiro. I know both pages exist, but I haven’t looked any further into them. I had the Internet installed not long ago and I’m not yet an expert browser, far from it.
• Why is it that a man like you, who writes poetry, essays and opinion columns and has always kept up with international events with so critical an eye, should suddenly start writing detective novels?
M. V. M.: The fact is that the whole of literature, absolutely all of it, is divided into detective novels and romantic novels. Quote me any title from any of the world’s literature and you will find that the subject matter either deals with an investigation into the violation of a taboo, in short a crime, or else is a love story.
Detective novels, as originally invented, with a fixed imaginative world, are a very run-of-the-mill and predictable genre. However, the modern detective novel of the past thirty or forty years shouldn’t be properly described as such. They’re novels like any others in which, basically, an investigation is conducted into the meaning of a social crime. As for how the subject is handled, in my opinion there’s no difference compared with a novel that’s not in the “detective” category. I regard John Le Carré and Graham Greene as being as ambitious in their literary aims as Virginia Woolf. I know that sounds heretical but I firmly believe it. What interests me is that it’s possible to start out from a set character and turn the story almost into a saga about the evolution of a society.
• How do you explain the success of Carvalho, the private detective who is the main character in your novels?
M. V. M.: I think he’s an international success for one reason: he’s been a mirror not only of the transition that’s taken place in Spain but transition in a broader sense. He’s a man who recreates the atmosphere of the 1960s, a time which held out great hopes of ecological change and saw the arrival of hippies, the birth control pill, freedom in every form and gentle, lyrical revolutions. There’s also a kind of fin-de-siècle despair, in which people are scared of losing their jobs and catching Aids and afraid of freedom, a fear that the Pope in Rome and the manipulators of labour markets, among others, have succeeded in instilling in them through a sort of repressive mechanism. Carvalho has mirrored all these things in the novels and that’s why I think that what he has to say can be heard in so many places.
• Why does cooking occupy so important a place in your books,
to the extent that it is almost like a character?
M. V. M.: In the first place, it’s because the only thing I can do, apart from write, is cook. Second, because it is a necessary ingredient, especially in the Carvalho series; cooking is hardly ever mentioned in my other novels. A set character has to have two or three recognizable quirks. There isn’t a single character who doesn’t have them. Everybody who reads Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels knows he’s waiting for the first seasonal dishes, the first spring peas in the brasserie, no matter how they’re prepared, and draught beer the way they only serve it in a particular bar. Readers wait for that to happen; they wait for Sherlock Holmes to play the violin or start sniffing. I gave Carvalho one or two of those traits and I’ve had to respect them from one novel to the next.
I believe, moreover, that cooking is also a metaphor for one’s own culture. I’ve sometimes stressed this. Cooking is the death mask. In order to eat we have to kill, whether it be a head of lettuce or an animal. If the act is a direct one, in other words if you kill and then eat, it is an act of barbarism. On the other hand, if you kill, cook and then eat, the cultural aspect appears; this involves applying to the act of killing a skill or technology that adds dignity and turns it into culture.
• What about book-burning, your hero’s other quirk?
M. V. M.: On several occasions Carvalho says he burns books because literature has not taught him how to live. That’s a meaningless exaggeration, but it’s a ritual the character has to perform.
• In literary terms, is Carvalho ever going to die?
M. V. M.: This poses a serious credibility problem for me. Carvalho is a man I originally shut myself up with and I reckoned on giving him more or less a certain age, but I kept on forgetting. However, the character’s psychological development corresponds to his physical development, and that makes it very hard for Carvalho to survive as a private detective because aggressiveness, physical strength and a whole gamut of facial expressions are involved, and frankly he cannot afford such luxuries. So in the millennium novel, which I hope will come out in the year 2000, either I can pension him off and get rid of him after he’s returned to the world with Biscuter (a former convict who is the detective’s assistant), or I can turn him into something else.
I once thought of turning Carvalho into a spy, what might be called a post-modern spy working for new powers that never had any spies before, like autonomous regional authorities, or a municipal, environmental, industrial or ethnic spy. That sort of thing is going to be big business in the future. In the present-day division of conflicts in the world, as essayists like Alvin Toffler and Hans Magnus Enzensberger have actually predicted, information services will be needed in the new climate of conflict that is liable to trigger future civil wars. So why not turn Carvalho into a spy for the Generalitat, the provincial government of Catalonia, with all the overtones of irony and symbolism of setting that could imply? I’m thinking about it as a possibility, but I don’t know yet whether I shall go ahead or not.
• How do you go about creating your books?
M. V. M.: I use a very conventional system in which I accumulate facts and ideas. The poet T.S. Eliot describes this creative process very clearly. One stage consists of gathering the materials, whether consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes you accumulate things you initially don’t think will end up as a book, a novel or a poem. Even so, you keep on building them up as a reserve, a sort of storehouse. When these materials are dense enough, they look for a way out. It’s rather like the moraine of a glacier which goes on piling up debris until the time comes for it to seek an outlet, when a current emerges. That’s how I see the creative process.
• In your writing, how do you manage to identify with places like Argentina or Bangkok so closely it’s as though you had lived there?
M. V. M.: First, there’s the information-gathering process I just mentioned. Then there’s the fact that people’s ideological and emotional patterns are coming increasingly to resemble each other because we consume the same food and the same cultural and media products. Our living patterns and production relations are becoming more and more alike. That means we can understand much more about how we ourselves behave and how other people behave.
Aristotle is supposed to have said “you are what you eat.” It’s a fact that, in cultural terms, all of us eat virtually the same things. The closest we can come to living in a Barcelona suburb and watching television is living in a Bangkok suburb and watching television, because all of us watch the same American programmes in any case.
• Is that why Barcelona is almost like another character in most of your novels?
M. V. M.: Yes. Barcelona is a port and a city of transit. It’s also a place where many memories exist side-by-side. All that makes it a multi-faceted city in every sense. Such cities tend to be very interesting from the literary point of view. Many cities have literary associations and others do not. A considerable amount of writing has been devoted to Barcelona, as it has to Buenos Aires and many other cities. In the United States, for example, a whole imaginary world has been created by books and films on San Francisco and New York, yet that hardly exists in the case of Washington.
• What does Barcelona mean to you personally?
M. V. M.: It’s my homeland, in the true sense of the word. It is the place where you were born, where your reflexes were shaped, where you learnt that other people exist and how much they are threatening or well-disposed towards you. It’s the place where you learnt codes of conduct–all kinds, not only having to do with language–and where you also learnt to pick up a system of signals that make you feel you belong to that particular parcel of territory more than to any other.
As you rationalize all this, you come to agree with Saint-Exupéry that you’re from the country of your childhood, since childhood is a piece of physical and emotional territory. That’s what Barcelona means to me.
More specifically, I’d say I’m not so much from Barcelona as from a particular neighbourhood of the city. That’s what marks you in the first place, although then you try to generalize and absorb other cultural features and patterns. That’s what Barcelona basically represents for me. Moreover, because of its layout and history, it’s not just one conventional city but a diversity of cities because it’s an amalgam of different archaeological periods. They’re not only monumental, such as the Romanesque city, the Gothic city, the neo-classical city, the city of modernismo and of Gaudí, but represent different periods of archaeology as they relate to human beings. Barcelona is a city that attracted various migratory movements which gave rise to the incorporation of new strands and to a degree of cross-fertilization following the clash with the culture that came before.
Moreover, Barcelona was largely shaped at the end of the last century by the influx of Catalans from the countryside, working-class people who flocked there to join the industrial revolution. Hence, it was a gathering-place for people from the grassroots all over the country.
• You’ve always had a sense of political commitment. Do you think writers are bound to be militants?
M. V. M.: Absolutely. Writing is an act of free choice. Some writers need to get involved in social and political issues and others do not. All we ask of a writer is that he or she should write well. I subscribe to the theory, which is in fact quite widespread, that there is always something ideological in what all writers have to offer, although they may seem to be completely impervious to that sort of thing. They can always be read in terms of ideology, of taking a stand in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes. Yet we must respect the free choice writers make, the fact that they want to feel they’re in touch with real-life causes and with their inner selves.
• You recently went to Cuba and reported on the visit of Pope John Paul II. Was that your decision or the idea of the editors of El País, the newspaper you write for?
M. V. M.: I went to Cuba to collect material for my next book and when the newspaper found out I was going there they asked me to write some articles. Everything you see before you comes from Cuba–all the folders, the documents, the books–everything on the tables has to do with Cuba, because I’m in full creative gear. That’s why it looks like a battlefield.
• What was the significance of that visit, as you see it?
M. V. M.: I feel that the Pope’s visit to Cuba was fundamental, because it’s astonishing that, at the end of the twentieth century, no lesser a personage than the Pope should purport to be the saviour of a Marxist revolution. I see it as something midway between a caricature and a miracle.
• What do you think the future holds in store for Europe? What role can a united Europe play in a globalized world?
M. V. M.: I think that whatever idea one may have of Europe, it cannot be separated from the idea of globalization. When the idea of a united Europe was put forward, people were thinking more in terms of power blocs. They thought Europe could be a third way. The first instinct was to prevent the recurrence of conflicting interests that had arisen in the struggle for the European market, which had triggered two world wars. That gave rise to the image of Europe as a bloc which could compete with the American and Asian blocs. Now we’re faced with the broader issue of globalization. I think the idea of a united Europe is still attractive because it includes one distinctive feature: the fact that Europe has a cultural substratum that’s different from all other possible blocs. This cultural substratum still weighs heavily in all the struggles for emancipation, equality and freedom that have formed part of the history of Europe. A European interpretation of the globalization of capital is bound to differ from that of a culture like that of the United States, where policy is geared to achieving results or to making the system run more efficiently.
On the other hand, in European policy, everything depends on the people conducting it. Even so, there’s still a background, a substratum that remembers the struggle for emancipation and social gains. This interpretation differs from that of capitalistic development. That’s how I see things.
• What if things don’t turn out like that?
M. V. M.: If things weren’t like that, I think I’d lose interest in the whole project. But if the Europe taking shape were to have a domestic and foreign policy and a more committed policy towards North-South relations, it would be the kind of Europe I could take an interest in. On the other hand, if it’s going to be just another bloc adopting the same policy as other blocs, there would obviously be no other course than to accept it as it is, but in that case I wouldn’t be interested in it. I believe the aim and purpose of a united Europe will largely depend on the relationship between the forces existing within it. If the hard-line neo-liberal sectors of unbridled capitalism end up imposing their will, Europe will become an uncontrolled capitalist bloc.
• How do you feel about the new electronic communication media? Do you think audio-visual culture will replace the culture of writing?
M. V. M.: Until now, every innovation that has appeared in the media has led to arguments over whether it was going to spell the demise of books. All the gloomiest predictions have been off the mark. Each medium has had its own territory and its own basic function. Perhaps it will be easier for the younger generations, who are already used to computers as working tools. But I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to read a literary text on a computer screen. It may be possible to create new forms of literary expression via the screen, but they won’t have the novel’s substance, time-span or length. New forms that are somehow connected with computers may well emerge, but I think that the traditional forms are very closely bound up with the formal shape of books, with the operation that makes it possible to re-read them and go back and forth in them, and with the tactile sensation of the object, the vehicle of literature epitomized by books.
• You’ve received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. What did that mean to you?
M. V. M.: It wasn’t a great symbolic ceremony, since nobody wore gowns or that sort of thing. It was just as my Italian publisher described it when she said it was like a “happening” from May 1968. Everybody was very relaxed and informal. I hardly noticed the ritual side, but obviously I was deeply moved. In a sense, the work I published on the history of communication had borne fruit.
I have very special memories of that university. When I was in prison I wrote a book entitled Informe sobre la información (Report on Information), which I published in 1963. All the material I used came from Unesco, since that was the only source I was allowed to read in prison. That’s why my book is so much like the MacBride Report, although if I may say so myself my work was published first, since I based it on Unesco’s reports on the inequality of newsprint distribution, the unequal distribution of the main news agencies, and so on. In Spain the book was like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, although I wrote it when I was twenty-two using materials that were far from adequate. At a time when access to all the literature on communication was restricted by the Franco regime or by the social doctrine of the Church, which wasn’t much better, the book was a sort of healing balm. It was used in secret by journalism schools and scholars.
I strengthened this link with the university by later becoming a lecturer in communication, conducting a number of seminars and publishing some books. All that forms part of my life’s substrata, and my admission to the university implies that this aspect of my work has been recognized.
• Do you think young people can look to the twenty-first century with hope?
M. V. M.: One should never give advice to anybody, or messages of hope for that matter. If we look at things in a fairly cynical light, in the best sense of the word, young people are going to need hope, although that implies self-deception. If you do not have a modicum of hope or confidence in the future, even though you have to deceive yourself, you would reach such a pitch of lucidity that the most advisable course would be to commit individual and collective suicide. To have hope you have to have a certain capacity for self-deception–or such extraordinary faith in your future plans, whether they have to do with religion, love, society or ideology, that you overcome everything in your path. That’s not easy in this day and age because it’s very hard to believe in great professions of faith after seeing what’s happened in history. As a result, we must come to the conclusion that hope is necessary for pursuing the mechanical game of existence. What we do have to abide by, what I convey in everything I write, is the fact that we’re standing at a rather ominous point in time as far as culture is concerned. What the dominant culture is now instilling in us above all is that historical knowledge and the search for the past are pointless, and that imagining utopias and thinking that things could be different are likewise pointless.
By trying to analyse why these two cultural trends should have cropped up at the same time, we find that they dovetail perfectly and make you attentive only to the present. You never pass judgment on the spectacle of social or economic disorder, nor do you seek to find out where that disorder originates. Since they’ve deprived you of the right to find out who in the past is to be blamed for the present, history is also left without anybody to blame. That’s what interests them.
Second, when you say we should organize things differently, they tell you you’re a dangerous utopian and don’t realize where the utopian dreams of the twentieth century have led us, that nothing forces you to accept what they’re offering you, whether it be order, the labour market, North-South relations or relations between the centre and the periphery. If you say things can be done differently, it’s almost as if you’re branded with the stigma of post-revolutionary nostalgia.
So if you’re to believe in the future, first you have to think of retrieving the past and of knowing the causes behind the life you’re now leading, and to exercise the right to change what you find, which is inherent in any new venture.
The UNESCO Courier