Life and death of a master of his own destiny

In the scholarly introduction he has written for this reissue of The life and death of Jordi Fraginals, the professor Josep Murgades It makes a kind of genealogy or inventory of many of the descriptions, interpretations and analyses that, more or less insightful, more or less reductionist, have been made over the decades of the very studious novel by Josep Pous i Pagès (Figueres, 1873–Barcelona, ​​1952): ruralist, history of a self-made-man, "the last modernist novel", a concretization of that precept of Albert Camus according to which the novel is a "universe where action finds its form"... Murgades' introduction, instructive in its nature as a hermeneutic sampler, is pertinent as a presentation of a classic of the Catalan novel of the 20th century because, written up to now, our duty as readers is to try to read the book from what we are today and here, without anachronisms or a priori assumptions.

First published in 1912, right at the crossroads of the two foundational movements of modern Catalan culture, Modernism and Noucentisme, The life and death of Jordi Fraginals It is a quintessential nineteenth-century novel: both for the protagonist's existential journey—a journey of formation, rebellion, overcoming adversity, and tragedy—and for the formalization of that journey, with a linear structure, an omniscient narrator, and a whole network of reflective elements and symbolic motifs. One might consider that a novel from the beginning of the twentieth century written according to nineteenth-century patterns is a novel that was born out of sync, but if there is one thing we should understand well into the twenty-first century, it is that synchronization with modernity—what is considered modernity at any given historical moment—has little or nothing to do with literary quality. At this point in the history of literature, we should also have learned that, ultimately, the passage of time synchronizes everything.

The struggle between traditionalism and the rebellious decision of a son

The life and death of Jordi Fraginals Read today, it has a sometimes didactic and somewhat naive effect, but its human and expressive core—the human drama it recounts, the language in which it recounts it—continues to assert itself with all its power and energy. If we had a solid and self-reliant audiovisual industry, a film or miniseries would have already been made. Beyond the rural setting and the theatricality of the dialogue, both the story and the characters and themes possess the strong and clear simplicity of archetypes, and are strikingly modern. The struggle between the obtuse, arrogant, and authoritarian traditionalism of Mateu Fraginals, who confuses the inertia of a secular social order with the eternal natural order of things, and the rebellious decision of his son Jordi to live life as he wants to live it, represents a very specific and universal conflict.

In The life and death of Jordi FraginalsAbsolutely everything—from the prose style to the protagonist's motivations and struggles—is underpinned by the self-affirming vitalism in vogue at the time Pous i Pagès wrote the novel. Scholars have mentioned Nietzsche, Ibsen, Alomar... However, Jordi Fraginals escapes the yoke of his stubborn and primitive father and renounces becoming a priest to pursue a life as a married man with children and a successful business entrepreneur. self-made man A textbook Anglo-Saxon, and not because he plays the role of an amoral bohemian artist or an impassioned revolutionary, it is not at all forced to also see the ethical and existential model of the poem If, by Rudyard Kipling, apostle of an industrious and productive individualism and of a pragmatic and diligent vitalism.

The life and death of Jordi Fraginals, a tragic celebration of "feeling alive with the fullness of someone who finds no undertaking impossible", remains a pillar, an old-fashioned but still robust and always venerable point, of Catalan narrative.