Toni Güell: "There are as many reasons to believe in the advent of a utopia as there are in the apocalypse"

BarcelonaToni Güell (Barcelona, ​​​​1979) reads every week – I have told him – a hundred opinion articles by national and international analysts due to his work as head of Opinion at ARA. Perhaps it was inevitable that concern for the direction of the world would be the guiding thread of his stories, which, with intelligence and wit, he takes towards political fiction and the literature of the unusual. Elephants (Empúries) is his literary debut and has earned him the 2024 Mercè Rodoreda Award. This Monday he will present it at the Ona bookstore (7 pm). His talent has burst the seams of an elephantine discretion.

The ARA editorial team found out that you were writing when you won the prize for the Night of Saint Lucia. Why do you write?

— I write because I like to read. I am fascinated by the mechanism that exists in literature: the mechanism that, from a spatial and temporal distance, awakens amusement and surprise in the reader, stirs him up, touches him, entertains him, and how the reader rewrites the work according to what he already has in his backpack. I find all this very stimulating. I hadn't mentioned it because I didn't feel that what I was doing was especially important and I didn't imagine winning the prize.

How does your work as an opinion journalist, which is the area of ideas, influence literature?

— Perhaps more than I think, because some of the themes in the book are the ones that are the concerns of our time and, therefore, in the headlines and in the news. But even if I didn't work for a newspaper, it's possible that the book would have come out pretty much the same.

In the age of autofiction, your stories do not look inward but outward, and you play with the tools of hard journalism, politics, economics, the system, taxes.

— The book has a first level of reading and that is to make it fun, entertaining, moving, stirring... And that already seems to me to have enough literary dignity. But it also has a second level, which becomes more explicit in some stories in which climate change appears, the influence of technology, the questions about where the income will come from in the future... There are a series of problems that have generalized a dominant narrative of fatalism, a monolithic framework in which it seems that we will not be able to overcome technology, and that it is too strong. It is a change of era that overwhelms us. The book is an attempt to short-circuit the fatalisms of our time. It is undermining the idea that there is always the possibility of finding an open door, individual and collective.

The first story already puts on the table a Catalan businessman who has made a fortune with gas stations and a climate liberation front on his doorstep. But what you do is make the man propose to lead the ecological revolution.

— The question is: look, friends, are we not going to solve that until a guy with all the characteristics that are most popular in our time takes over? Trying to annoy or disturb is fun and literature allows it. Opinion articles too, but literature even more so.

The man has already warned that if they are serious, they will only have hot water for three or four days, and that is when things will die down and everyone will go home. Some revolutions depend on being willing to sacrifice quotas of well-being.

— These are some of the things that make us think that change is not possible, inertias such as well-being, or ideological inertias such as the feeling that there is nothing outside the system in which we live. The typical phrase that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." The book is neither right-wing nor left-wing because it would distract us from the central issue, which is that there are alternatives. I try to place in the collective imagination some ingredients that are not very present: trust, hope and responsibility, even if it is unpleasant.

However, the stories share a latent fatality, a dramatic uncertainty, the feeling that the worst could happen...

— One of the moments of genesis of the book may be the day it fell into my hands. Buscamón, by Lluís Racionero, which is set around the year 1000, when there is a feeling in the air that the apocalypse or the advent of a utopia is imminent. It made me think that we are also living in a rather millenarian time now. There are as many reasons to believe in the advent of a utopia as there are in the apocalypse, and often for the same reasons: networks, artificial intelligence, genetics. This dramatic force has penetrated the book.

The most intimate and familiar stories are more filled with hope than the collective ones, I would say. Instead, I think of the impoverished Nordic city that decides to record the wind, and immediately the meteorological taxes are copied at home.

— This is an invitation to experiment and not to be afraid of inventing new utopias. Because what is missing is an alternative. Marina Subirats said in relation to the Process that it was the available utopia. Now there are no available utopias. The story imagines an economic system lived with fun, two things that I would say have never been linked. Our economic system generates money from things that we have decided are going to generate money. Why not others? Why not choose a wave? Or a show of ingenuity, a book or a breakthrough in science? The idea is that if the story seems like nonsense to you, when you go out and return to reality perhaps you will look at it with more skepticism, with a more critical eye. If the impossible is so close in fiction, perhaps it is there in reality too.

In this story you can imagine how a state of opinion is created and destroyed. How are consensuses generated?

— In that city it is easy because, as in a post-apocalyptic world, communities are very fragmented, they are smaller. The bigger it is, the more difficult it is. And, in fact, one of the current problems of the European Union is that, when it most needs it, it is not unified in the space of public opinion. It is complicated. The network gives us a lot of power to mobilize, but at the same time it disintegrates us a lot. Traditional actors of democratic deliberation such as journalism have it much more difficult because they have lost the power of prescription and the idea of authority is very eroded. And among all of this we drag along authentic nonsense.

How now?

— For example, we live with inequality without looking at it in the face. Or, for example, we need a pandemic to come along to make the sad discovery that there are many people who live alone. This seemed to me to be a sensational collective ridicule.

In fact, there is a story that talks about friendship and home as a refuge while danger comes from outside.

— On the one hand, there is the isolation between worlds, ours and the places where horrible things happen. We have the belief from the hedonistic city that this has nothing to do with us, that it is far away from us, that we are already doing what we must do, and we do not think that in one way or another the geopolitical imbalances of the world reach you and end up exploding in your face in the form of a climatic catastrophe or whatever. On the other hand, the story asks why it takes this complete destruction to induce the protagonist to reflect on what makes sense in life. It is that we create it, the meaning. Like friendship. And this is another open door: we are capable of doing extraordinary things.

The title cannot be ignored, Elephants.

— Here are some rhodoredian objects, symbolic ones. The elephant is the exotic idea that you had not considered and that, perhaps by accident, comes to you and opens a gap, a rupture in reality towards a positive change.

I have discovered that elephants are not pachyderms!

They are proboscis. I discovered this while writing the book. We were saying a moment ago that dominant narratives sometimes lead us down paths that are not necessarily true.