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THE ACORN

THE TORTURE OF DOCTOR JOHNSON

For many years I did no literary work, so I would have preferred to submit an essay or a fragment of an essay, but it would have been too long. So I selected a few paragraphs from my most recent novel, El testimonio de Yarfoz, which seemed to me the most ingenious and inventive. I picked them just because I like them and because they seem like a joyful creation, especially the part about the begging baboons; the part about the ramp is a bit tedious because it’s difficult to describe.

IN CONVERSATION WITH THE DEAD

I’m not familiar with that Quevedo sonnet—I don’t really like him as an author. I prefer the dead of my own family, of which there are many, but the authors who I would mention are not authors I read for pleasure, but rather read to use in essays. I’ll mention several books that are, you might say, those I frequently reference. Almost all of them, oddly enough, are German. One is Austrian Karl Bühler, his Sprachtheorie, the Theory of Language, and the Theory of Expression. Another is Theordor Wiesengrund Adorno, all of his works except the one on Aesthetics, which is unintelligible. No one understands his Aesthetics. And also Max Weber, all of his work, especially Economy and Society and The Sociologies of Religion. Those two in particular. And maybe some other types of works as well, like a field study examining the practices of certain industrial workers and the way the parts and muscles of the human body, and its proper movements, compare with the violent and twisted movements that in some cases industrial-manual labor requires of them, but apparently they don’t like field studies. It’s odd, but the writers who interest me most are theorists.

Those are the authors who I consult and cite, among several others. The influence just comes about from consulting the text. If Adorno has something on what I’m looking for, well I go to the text, and there you go; or I transcribe it or cite it without transcribing it or paraphrase it, but it is always a conscious consultation, with one exception, employed all the time and unique for being a literary author, that is Franz Kafka, who seems to me the most extraordinary author of this century as well as many prior centuries.

CODA

Critics have said that you are “the twentieth century author with the greatest lexical richness and that you use the language with the greatest precision and meticulousness. That the breadth of your narrative register does not cease to amaze, from fantasy to the objectivity of El Jarama.” All told, this precision has an impressionistic poetic and a symbolic strength. The fantastical world of prince Nébride comes to seem even more real than reality itself. In the beginning was the word. Could Yarfoz and prince Nébride be a sort of fantastical Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Prince Nébride seems to be a character of uncertain destiny.

The greatest lexical richness is false because what I have are prohibitions—self-prohibitions—and not a very broad vocabulary. For example, I can’t say “efectuar.” I never use the verb efectuar or the verb realizar. I always say “hacer” and I was greatly annoyed when I discovered that the verb efectuar was already in use in the sixteenth century. I am precise and meticulous in terms of description, but it’s not richness of vocabulary. Sometimes I have a predilection for antiquated words—some—very few, but that’s another story.

I don’t now how to apply personality and fate to these characters, but they aren’t characters of personality. They are characters of fate because they are part of a plot; here, for example, they are going into exile. They have personalities like everyone, but the manifestation of their personalities is not part of the plot. They have almost no personality, but they do have fate; things happen to them, they do things. So the previous comparison of Yarfoz and prince Nébride, because they are on horseback, is absolutely ridiculous, in the first place because Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are definitely characters of personality and all of Quixote is the manifestation of their personalities. Besides, mounts—the donkey and the horse—are subject to sumptuary norms of the time in which Quixote was written, perhaps they were in decline, but up until then the mount you rode was symbolic of your social status. It was prohibited for a peasant like Sancho Panza to ride a horse. Maybe already in the seventeenth century some peasants did because there were so many bandits who rode horses around the end of the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the seventeenth, but before then horses were status symbols, and the “nobleman” Alonso Quijano the Good had to ride a horse, as the word caballero (horseman) indicates. This is emphasized by, although I do not know until when, the fact that the mule was the mount of the clergy. The clerics rode mules, the caballeros rode horses, and peasants rode donkeys.

I could point out that the Christian interpreters of the Gospel say that Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem on a donkey because it was a humble mount. Out of humility. The donkey was the sumptuary mount as the victory song shows, the Song of Deborah (Judges 5:10). It was the mount of the most noble. There were seven white donkeys in the Song of Deborah. So, Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem to take power and the people sang to him “Hosanna, filio David” because “son of David” means “you are of the Jewish tribe” and a descendent of David and you are entering Jerusalem to retake the throne of David. This is the most modern interpretation that there is. It does not take heed of the mount. This is something I say to myself, it seems to me that it is a mount of the nobles and moreover what they sing is “son of David” meaning “king of the Jews.” He was not coming to die. He was coming to triumph, not to triumph through death, which is a Christian solution, but to triumph as the king of Jerusalem. So, Nébride and Yarfoz both ride horses, but there are no great social divisions among the Grágidos. There was no triumph. It has not ended. Soon they lose importance because they die and the history of the Grágidos continues.