Jaume Subirana: "I don't need a writer to be 'forever faithful to the service of this people'"

BarcelonaJaume Subirana (Barcelona, ​​​​1963) reflects on a thorny issue in the hundred pages of the essay Literature, language and place (Anagrama, in Catalan and Spanish). The writer, professor of Catalan literature at the UPF and former director of the Institut des Lettres Catalanes, analyzes what "empites" Catalan literature and what expands it, observes the coexistence of colonialism and essentialism, and proposes new horizons.

His essay is based on the key question: what is Catalan literature?

— This can be answered very briefly—Catalan literature is literature written in Catalan—and then there is no book, nor is there any doubt that in the 21st century, at the intersection of literature, language, and place, beneath the cloud of identity, quick or easy answers don't fit the little ones. To understand the importance of literature, of writers, of contemporary themes, books, bookstores, libraries, and the press, you need to go a little further than the definition.

But doesn't this happen already?

— Whether we teach literature or Catalan philology, this doesn't happen. In Catalan Philology, we studied Eugenio de Oros until 1921, when he started writing in Spanish. This is a beast. Terenci MoixWe study Catalan books in Catalan Philology, and in Spanish Philology, they study Spanish books. It's nonsense.

Limited to the university, it may be so, but I would say that readers and media are much more porous. You raise specific cases, such as Cercas, Amela, Candel, Zafón, Guimerá, Hachmi, Serés, Joan Lluís Lluís, Agnès Agboton, Carme Riera, Virginie Despentes... they are authors we've discussed, the media.

— Not everyone treats everyone. Catalan media and Catalan readers quite naturally read books in Catalan and other languages, but the energy isn't bidirectional or flows in the same direction for Spanish and Castilian media; there isn't the same level of interest.

Oh no, of course. I was speaking from the ARA's perspective. In the book, he quotes Màrius Serra when he says: "Team A reads A and B, and B reads B."

— This happens. The book can make some people nervous. When I talk about Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the colonialist traits that exist in Spain regarding culture, I can think of a number of people who won't like it at all. And I also have friends who have told me that Amela is neither a writer nor Catalan literature. But literature is all literature, whether we like it or not, the good and the not so good. Books with articles by Quim Monzó are literature. We consider Maragall a great writer because he wrote poetry, but all the articles he wrote in Spanish are in a newspaper archive and no one looks at them. I'm not saying we have to change the definition of Catalan literature; that would be absurd, but I think we can only understand, legislate, and think if we look at literature in a broader sense.

Why do you think it is necessary to free literature from the representation of community?

— It's a paradigm that made a lot of sense in the 19th century, which is understood at the time of the constitution of nation states and national cultural communities, but today it does not represent this much more fluid reality, of very changing identities, especially multilingual, etc. of slogans, they turned an Iberianist into an independentist, they turned a fine poet into something that seemed like Chinese cookies, with that rhetoric of "forever faithful to the service of this people" is good because his literature was at the service of his people? Emily Dickinson Is it good because it's forever faithful to its people? William Shakespeare? Homer? We have so many things to be proud of, but valuing literature and managing literature based on that idea of community service seems wrong to me.

Service, he says, to rhetorical nationalism.

— Catalan nationalism and the Catalan soul have a tendency toward rhetoric and sentimentality. There are many explanations for this. And a certain kind of literature is very helpful in this regard.

But literature has always been a source of collective identity.

— Yes, it has been, it makes perfect sense, but that doesn't mean that literature that doesn't comply with this isn't good literature, nor does it guarantee that it will continue to be so in the future. And to see to what extent this is a distorted view, is that when we see it in others it gives us great anguish, like when we see Pérez-Reverte with his novels about the tercios in Flanders. Placing literature at the service of collective identity is a combination that has worked for a long time, but for me it doesn't make sense today. I don't need a writer, to be good, to be "forever faithful to the service of this people." I honestly don't need that, I don't care.

In the book he goes on to unravel a whole list of authors who raise doubts, until reaching the extraordinary case of the Castilian author-writer who won the Ciutat de Palma prize with a translation into Catalan.

— We can base literature on the emotional attachment to identity, but then we find people who see that there are many prizes and money in Catalan, they press a button and... is it Catalan literature now? The list isn't of entomological interest, but rather seeks to get closer to reality, which is complex. For many years, Quim Monzó made a living writing articles in Spanish in The Vanguard It never occurred to any of us to say he was a Castilian writer, but according to traditional definitions, he was a Spanish writer of Castilian literature; the other thing is that the Spanish people didn't pay any attention to him.

What reasons will make these kids decide?

— It's the million-dollar question. We each know our own case and can study the reasons. There are people whose native Spanish language has decided to switch to Catalan, but there are more who have gone the other way. There are also cases of foreigners who have learned Catalan and become cultural agents.

Why is Catalan the language of this site?

— Because it's the language of the place, and it can be the language where interesting things happen. The reasons for this choice can be sentimental, ideological, a sense of belonging, or a literary tradition. My reasons are no longer those of my students: when I was a child, Spanish was the language of the Catalan police, and now Catalan is the language of the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police); therefore, this argument no longer works. Now, there are issues that have to do with power, subordination...

It remains a minority language.

— Unlike what we thought in the 1980s, when we had the fantasy that Catalan should be the country's meeting place, the space for socialization that would eventually become the majority, we had the Pujol fantasy, the fantasy of normalization...

If you say fantasy, does it mean that we can no longer aspire to it?

— I don't know the future, but we're not here now. Catalan is a minority language, a minority language in its territory. But it's a very rare minority language.

Because it has official status in its territory.

— The children of immigrants study in Catalan, and their parents receive grades in Catalan. Catalan is both the hegemonic language and the subordinate language. This is very complicated and at the same time extremely interesting. There are places where linguistic substitution is already taking place, like Alicante or Northern Catalonia, places where there's a struggle... it's fascinating and very sad for those of us who are active. On the streets and in the statistics, Catalan is already a minority, but we continue to look to references to manage the majority, like Belgium, Quebec, France, or Italy. But we're not. And, on the other hand, historically we've had a somewhat dismissive attitude toward situations involving clearly minority languages, like the languages in France, like Welsh, like Aymara, or Quechua in Latin America, and I think we should look at what's happening. Our focus cannot be on fidelity to our roots, and as we said at the farmhouse, but on how to create new Catalans, perhaps with a less pure Catalan and without our identifying references. Along with this, there's a lot of very good news, which many literatures have envied, but since we're so trained in swinging a stick, we don't really know it.

The publication figures, for example, are impressive: around 8,700 titles are published, more than in Greece or Sweden.

— There's a constant influx of new voices into the literary world, which means that Catalan and Catalan literature still have an aura. This is impressive and a treasure we must preserve. Sant Jordi is great news. We live in a country that is a publishing powerhouse in many languages. The Catalan literary system is very open and permeable. Where I see distortions is in how we explain it to ourselves, in the celebrationism of the Generalitat. The Republic participated in the centenary of Cervantes, Goethe, and Dante, and now we tell ourselves that there's a man from Sant Fost de Campsentelles who wrote four very important books.

Is the institutionalization of literature provincial?

— Yes. Believing they're reinforcing it, they provincialize it. And the other thing that's tiresome is the rhetoric that there's no money. Public authorities in Catalonia don't invest money in language and culture, and in turn, they don't take language and literature out of their mouths. And it must be said, because there's a political responsibility. The fact that the Llull Institute has a ridiculous budget isn't Madrid's fault; rather, we think our international dimension is ridiculous. The reason the IEC doesn't have a headquarters in Mallorca is because we believe a roundabout in Gandesa is more important. Writers don't need money to write, but language does need a lot of public resources—money, attention, and politics—and that hasn't been done in Catalonia.

Do you think essentialism is a reaction to the feeling of constant threat, of danger of disappearing?

— According to science, everything will disappear. At some point, we will have to decide which wars we want to fight and which ones we don't. The rhetoric and the constant thinking that we are disappearing, even if it's true, which I don't know, doesn't improve things unless it serves to encourage more investment. Catalan is a median language among the world's languages, and the health of Catalan is infinitely better than most of the languages in its league. You can compare yourself to French or Greek or Sanskrit or Kikuyu, and depending on where you look, you are one way or another. We want to play in the league of the majors when we are not majors. Looking up is very good from an aspirational point of view, but you should also look around and down to see what is happening in minority literatures around the world. Milan Kundera explains that Iceland—an isolated, closed, small country that was on the verge of disappearing—wrote a fundamental piece in the history of Western literature, which are the sagas. We must think about what our sagas are, not whether we are older or younger. And we must stop the over-ideologization of everything to see things as they are, without preconceptions, without seeking out ideas that coincide with us. We must change the way we think about literature, language, and identity, but it's more convenient to reproduce commonplaces. This essay encompasses years of trying to think laterally, stepping outside the box. I'm very interested in discussing it, and less interested in playing in the Olympic Games of good and bad.