Toni Sala: "Language is a detector of the freedom of a country"

GironaIn the last eleven years Toni Sala (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1969) has published three novels that are three ways of approaching life and death. Scenarios(The Other) culminates the trilogy that began with The boys (L'Otra, 2014) and continued with Persecution (La Otra, 2019). Together they also form a portrait of Catalonia in the midst of the independence process and post-independence process. The writer, one of the most solid and least complacent voices in Catalan literature, now tells the story of Tomàs Niubó, a popular actor who suffers a road accident near Puigcerdà. This event brings him closer to Vadó, a fat and lonely man who finds him, and Olga, a nurse who works at the hospital where the actor will end up. They are the vertices of an introspective and exuberant narrative triangle, through which Sala delves into the minds of three wounded and simultaneously disoriented characters, as much as the society they inhabit.

You close a cycle that began in 2014 with The boysDid you conceive him like that from the start?

— No, after writing Persecution I realized this would be a trilogy. The boys It was a short story and when Eugenia [Broggi] told me she was opening a publishing house, she suggested turning it into a novel, which ended up opening L'Otra. With Persecution I saw that everything was revolving around the theme of death again, and Jan Arimany, my Spanish editor, told me: "This will be a trilogy." Death is at the center of each book; they are concentric circles. The boys It is more external, because it comes from an accident. In Persecution There's a murder. And here I can't explain it, but it's even more central to the person.

Why do you write about death?

— I don't choose it. Death haunts us all, and with love, it forms the two pillars of literature. It allows me to touch everything, because it's universal and absolutely literary. Since no one knows anything (because no one has returned), the only way to talk about it is through literature. No scientist can say anything, and writers, on the other hand, can say a lot. It's inevitable to end up.

One of the protagonists is a successful actor who left audiovisuals for the theater. Why did you assign him that role?

— It's one of the few things I had clear when I started writing. The actor personifies the text, embodies it. With theater, on the one hand, the text is fleshly, the word embodied. And, at the same time, it's external because the actor, while reciting, can look at himself from the outside, see what he's saying, and reflect on what he himself is embodying. I wanted to reflect on writing itself from the outside.

Has this influenced the form? Monologues make up a large part of the book.

— At first, I thought I'd write a book of monologues, but he's hooked on the novel, and I think it actually enriches it. I had that intuition. When I start writing, I don't really know what it'll be about or how I'll do it. There's a pulsating energy, it sets a mechanism in motion, it's like a heart that sets the blood pumping, like a dive, as if I were an alien arriving in a universe, taking notes with my notebook.

The other two protagonists, Vadó and Olga, share the fact that they are very overweight and have suffered from society's exclusionary judgment their entire lives. What interested you about this physical trait?

— On the one hand, I'm increasingly interested in creating corporeal literature. On the other, I also wanted to focus on the dislocated individual, who needs to look at the world from the outside because, even if he doesn't want to, everything pushes him inward. Any form of art is also a form of exile. When we read, in a way, we are leaving the world to enter another realm. Through this play, which is never easy or complacent, you can see how things are.

Some of these monologues are overwhelming and tend toward excess. How did you work on the rewrite?

— I work word by word, like a bricklayer, brick by brick. It's complicated, because although they say less is more, sometimes saying more is saying less. Paradoxically, excess is also part of reduction: to attenuate a phrase you need to say it twice, thus losing its intensity. I was also interested in the oral aspect of theater, as if the characters were drunk on speaking, the drunkenness of consciousness. I wanted to go beyond limits. The writers who interest me are those who traverse restricted territories in normal life. Literature is for that.

Olga is perhaps the character who pushes the boundaries the most. She has set herself a mission: to find a man, get pregnant without telling him, and then disappear to bear the child alone.

— She is deeply disillusioned and has decided that she will embrace motherhood without having to rely on a man. She decides against artificial insemination because she wants to know who the father is. Here, the question arises about the moral implications of not telling the man that he will be a father. It poses a conflict for the reader: do I agree or disagree?

Beyond the characters' journeys, your novels also reflect the current situation in Catalonia. In this novel, you convey an image of collective failure.

— Scenarios It's the post-process. There will be few Catalans who think we're living through a brilliant moment in our history. Not even the president of the Generalitat (Catalan government) says so. This has happened to us. I wish there were a different atmosphere. Sometimes I think this trilogy is the fruit of a moment of self-confidence in the country, with a beginning, middle, and end approach. It's a tragedy, and as such, it also ends badly.

One of the novel's most heartbreaking moments is the monologue in which Tomàs states that "we are linguistic zombies" and Catalan "is a poisoned rat."

— Language is a detector of a country's freedom. It is the greatest cultural achievement humanity has ever achieved, its highest expression. I understand culture as an area of freedom, because it serves to expand it. That's why, whenever there is repression, the first to suffer is culture, and vice versa. What's happening to us now is that our language is repressed, and that affects our freedom.

In the monologue, the actor is very angry and says sarcastically that it is better to let it be, to abandon the fight.

— They want to convince us of this. By constantly trying to convince others, there comes a time when you give up. The world is full of people who have given up, who have switched to Spanish when speaking to others. The president, the influencers Those who believe they'll have a larger audience have simply given up, and often do so unconsciously. It's terrible, because it also has to do with culture, because culture and freedom are conscience. We have a heritage and we must defend it. The freedom that language gives us no longer gives us freedom, we Catalans know that. What happens is that there's a lack of culture that prevents us from being aware of the importance of a language. And this, inevitably, we must relate to teaching.

You have already been very critical of the teaching in Short chronicle of a high school teacher (Ediciones 62, 2001). More than 20 years have passed.

— What has been done to education is a crime. One or two generations have been stripped of literature and humanism. The education ministers of the last six or seven terms should be taken and put on public trial. It's impossible that they were unaware of what was happening in the classrooms. All of this has an impact on culture and language.

And the teachers?

— They are completely helpless. Education has been degraded, including its most important asset: the teachers. This isn't the teachers' fault; they've been ripped off from all sides; they're also victims. It's the counselors' fault, starting with Carme Laura Gil. I met her when I did the Short chronicle... And the first thing he said to me was, "What do you know?" "I'm in a classroom, and you're not," I replied. Instead of agreeing with me, he belittled me. This has continued until we've reached this point where public education practically doesn't exist anymore; it's a disaster.

Is it being solved?

— Not at all. We Catalans give ourselves so much importance, saying we're civilized and cultured, and we've ended up at the bottom of Europe. It's not just a problem there, indeed, but it's worse there. Also because of the very importance that culture has for Catalans. If we're not cultured, we're nothing. Schools need a top-to-bottom overhaul, but we're so disoriented, we've taken it so seriously, that we've left teaching in the hands of robots. If a teacher does a homework assignment, a robot will do it. The teacher knows it, the student knows it, and the politician who allows the use of computers knows it. It's part of a general hypocrisy.

Now it seems that Screens will disappear from classrooms or at least their use will be reduced..

— It took them five or ten years to decide that cell phones shouldn't be allowed in schools. Wasn't it obvious from day one that having toys in class is annoying? Where are those responsible for this? And all the money spent on screens, giving computers to students? It's like someone putting poison on a field so that it remains barren forever. And there are still educators like Jaume Funes, that They say that students do not read and should not readThis man, who had to learn to read and read several books to write this article, is depriving others of the opportunity to read. It's a disgrace.