A Bit of Poetics

I'm talking about that really succinct theory described by Carner in Teoria de l'ham poetic [Theory of the Poetic Lure], which speaks of a stone thrown into a pond, or what we might call a flash or inspiration. It's more than an impact: it stirs up the waters, sets off expanding concentric circles, bringing into being energies that were latently alive.

What's important, then, is not the stone, or the impact, or even the water but everything that was quiescent and that is now moving.

Some years ago, I would have said that I wrote to be loved, which is what one said in those times. Then, I'd add that my only fealty is to form, that the form informs everything so that nothing would exist unless it belonged to its realm, which is made up of unjust laws, discriminatory treatment and dictatorial decrees.

One day, years ago, my daughter Laia didn't want to put on some corduroy pants because she said they were made of wood.

I believe in these things: in the stone and the pond, in the fact that I'm loved, in the word that infuses life, in the secret that hides in a pair of pants that, for her and those who read them, especially now that I'm writing about them, are not made of corduroy but of wood.

"Poètica", Caràcters, Nº. 19-20 (May 2002), p. 24.

It's been said...

The person who doesn't seem to have problems with the up-to-date thematic reference or with matters of form and structure is Josep Maria Fonalleras. With August & Gustau (Empúries, 2001), Fonalleras discloses his interest in experimentation with better than notable results.

A little closer to the undecipherable enigma than Monzó – to continue with the distinction I made at the outset – this novel of Fonalleras is, more than anything else, an essay that constitutes a discourse against time. This is the case in both content and form. It is so both because the disquisitions about predestination and determinism constitute one of its thematic linchpins and because the work as a whole also reflects in its organisation the desire to order the discourse from almost timeless criteria. The anecdotes on the basis of which the story is constructed are not serendipitous, especially the one that has the main character redoing the jigsaw puzzle of a painting "The Studio of Apelles" by the Flemish painter Willem van Haecht. In fact, the book could just as well have been called "Puzzle" since this is basically the dominant impression that the reader draws from it, that of a narrator who brings to the territory of writing the disorder of the procedure of putting together a jigsaw puzzle for which we have the overall sample picture yet we end up reconstructing it starting from a certain degree of chance, from a discipline that somehow breaks with logical temporality. Fonalleras is, as I see it, one of the most powerful Catalan narrators. Books like August & Gustau make us a little more optimistic about the vitality of Catalan fiction.

In this regard, Monzó and Fonalleras are alike, and also in their practice of fuzziness, in their defence of a nonconformist stance that puts the mechanisms of fiction in the service of a view of reality that is different from what the customs and clichés would have us believe. Perhaps at some point it would be worth working out how much of the cute is there since they are both examples of "the zany-agonising voice" which has been the inspiration of the publisher at Empúries in constructing the house canon. In any case, their literature has always shown that it is willing to push at limits. And we readers are grateful for that.

Vicent Alonso, "Cinc narradors d'interès: Monzó, Cercas, Borràs, Usó i Fonalleras", Caràcters, Nº. 16 (June 2001), p. 18.