The lost awards

“It is no coincidence that this year they are giving the Planeta to a South American writer,” a literature teacher said to me the other day. She was right, with a million at stake, coincidences are difficult, and even more so if the presentation is made by the kings. They are not going to give a million to just anyone who walks by, and even less so for literary virtues.

Coincidences? Last year another million-euro prize was created, the Aena, also awarded in Barcelona. Nowhere else in the world will you see such a profusion of prizes and endowments – the Nobel itself gives little more than a million, but it is for a lifetime's work. Anyone would say that a superior literature flourishes here, watered and pampered like nowhere else. Here there is no need to even teach it in school, in fact not even practice it seriously, here literature has unanimous recognition, it grows alone on fruit trees full of ripe books, with colorful covers among printed leaves, and the cities smell of fresh ink and every day is Saint George's Day.

In reality, few are deceived. Years ago, awards provided prestige; later they became commercial promotion; today they are above all institutional operations that take advantage of the misery or vanity of the contestants. If Ramon Llull, Josep Pla, or Prudenci Bertrana were to raise their heads and see the novels awarded in their name...

There is a very good phrase by Nietzsche: “We have art in order not to die of the truth”. I also think that literature must be tamed, like horses, in a joint effort between the author and the readers. That it be expelled from awards and education, from televisions and libraries, even makes some sense. The problem comes when, by dint of training literature, it ends up not being domesticated but turned into a servile, skeletal, whiny, and sterile animal. The horse ends up converted into a Trojan horse full of barren and comforting literature, to deceive and to occupy the literary space, to raze it and turn it into a desert.

I do have some awards. I was able to publish my first book thanks to the Documenta award, and later on, they even gave me the National Prize for Literature, and a few others. I have also been denied many, thank God. Money interests me like any responsible father of a family, and it is no joy not being able to win the Planeta, but I am willing to accept that, in reality, these awards do indeed serve literature by marginalizing it. What choice do we have in life, if not optimism. How much money and how many tantrums I have saved myself, simply by checking, at the bookstore, that the novel I was going to buy did not have any award!