Guillermo Martínez: “Critics have their own novels, their own groups, something like their own literary party”

He is one of the most widely read Argentine writers in his country and most celebrated and awarded in the world. Critic and narrator, in the work of Guillermo Martínez there are books of stories such as those of Inferno Grande, novels such as About Roderer, The Master's Wife, Imperceptible Crimes (which came to the cinema as The Oxford Crimes, directed by Alex de la Iglesia), The Slow Death of Luciana B. (director Sebastian Schindel filmed The Wrath of God based on this novel and will be released soon) , I also had a bisexual girlfriend, Alicia's Crimes (winner of a Nadal Prize) and essays such as Borges and Mathematics and The Literary Reason.

His latest novel, The Last Time, is part of the long tradition of novels in the writers' environment or stories of teachers and disciples that authors such as Henry James or Philip Roth so wonderfully frequented. In Martínez's novel, which takes place in the middle of the 90s, A., an Argentinean writer living in Barcelona who spends his days prostrate due to a degenerative disease, wants to give Merton to read his latest manuscript, perhaps the best critic he has ever known in a long time, the most lucid and unbribable, who, precisely thanks to his intellectual honesty and after being the most successful and feared of his peers, he ended up outside the legitimization circuit of literature. Merton then travels to Barcelona to discover the greatest secret of A., who, on the verge of death, is convinced that it was never properly read.

The last time is a novel about literary construction and also about the construction of literary successes. At the center of the discussion, there are reflections on sexual desire and possible readings about male competition and, somewhat more lateral, as was the case until a few years ago, the decorative place of muses occupied by the women of writers at that time, the Lolitas who played to be great to be paid attention to them and a single woman central and almost protagonist: a mythical literary agent who knew how to do the numbers for the authors she represented and also for herself, of course.

— Your new novel has a lot to do with Henry James, especially with his story “Next Time”. Tell me a little about your taste for Henry James literature and how the idea for Last Time came about.

— Look, actually, strangely enough, although I had read many of Henry James' stories about the literary scene, the clue to this particular story was given to me by Daniel Guebel on a trip we shared at a congress in Villa Gesell. He told me about this nouvelle that I had not read; I was very interested when I finally read it. And the connection has to do with a trip I took to Barcelona in 93, which was when I met Carmen Balcells, the great Spanish literary agent. She made a comment to me at the time, I was like a hog because the big publishing groups were starting to hire people from outside the literary world as commercial directors. The example she gave me and that almost shocked her was that the previous experience of one of the commercial directors had been selling sneakers, so well, now she was going to sell books as she used to sell sneakers. And then she said a phrase to me: “Well, but anyway, when the time comes, you're still going to need someone who understands literature, right?” Then I came up with the idea for a slightly Jamesian novel, which would update the characters of the literary scene. The contemporary editor, the agent, the awards, the festivities, the consecration, and so on. And I remember that at another writers' congress I commented in the talk I gave that I had this novel in mind and Guillermo Saccomanno, when the talk ended, told me: well, hurry to write it because otherwise I'm going to write it (laughs). Luckily I got here earlier. And well, the novel has to do with a time that has somehow passed but in which I participated, which was the 90s, and in which the weight of criticism was very important, especially in newspapers. In other words, sometimes having a review in a journal or not defined the existence of the book. There were very few alternative channels, very few literary magazines. And I remember that actually appearing in one of the three great newspapers with a review, regardless of whether it was adverse or benevolent, was something very important for the authors then. At the same time, the figure of the critic was also of some importance. So, I exaggerated that world of that time a little and imagined a literary critic who was both intellectually respected, much feared, and who could be the only reader and the last reader of this writer tormented with this anxiety that writers tend to have that nobody reads exactly what they want to say.

— You're talking about a time we both knew very well. You knew her from the writer's place, I knew her well from the inside from one of those two or three diaries (laughs) that if they interviewed you or reviewed your book, it could really mean an endorsement.

- I also did reviews at that time...

- Yes, I know.

- I did about fifty reviews for La Nación, Clarín, and it happened to me that I have been paid reviews that never appeared. I mean, those things also happened.

— Of course, what I want to say is that we knew very well at that time a literary scene where what started to happen were publishing mergers in large groups and how smaller publishers began to disappear, in reality the ones that disappeared were the medium-sized publishers. What we saw a lot in Argentina after 2001 is how they started the small and boutique publishers, which, strangely enough, were the favored labels for supplements. Why am I saying this? Because in that Henry James story two models of writers appear, Limbert, a man who is not successful and Mrs. Highmore, a woman who is pure success. One envies the other, that is, one envies the possibility of having many readers while the other what envies is the possibility of being well regarded and prestigious.

— “A splendid failure”.

- Exactly. There is a dilemma there. Is it not possible to be someone who is highly celebrated by readers and also celebrated by critics? Is that perhaps the greatest dream for a writer?

- Yes, I think so. Of course, never unanimously because there is always a kind of distrust, skepticism of the “initiates” in literature. Part of the prestige is played by the fact that they would have knowledge that is not accessible to the common. So, naturally, and as happens in many other disciplines, sometimes what is most successful is considered suspicious. It happened to me from going to literature conferences where... Suddenly I read a Japanese author who seems extraordinary to me and spoke to another Japanese writer who is at the congress and I warn that the one I am interested in is despised in Japan. Because it is the only one that succeeds internationally. So, that's very symptomatic, it's like a kind of cliché that happens not only in Argentina. And I think it has to do with the fact that success in literature depends on the opinion of others, it is something that is built with period music, with certain established criteria that you don't want to play. With niches of power, whether in cultural supplements, in academic spaces or whatever. It's not something that shines by itself, you have to build that idea. For example, a tennis player wins a tournament and can win it with the whole grandstand against it, to tell you something.

- Of course, of course.

— Grigori Perelman, the mathematician who proved one of the five most famous open theorems, rejected the million dollars they offered, didn't give interviews, didn't even worry about sending it to a referee magazine because he knew he had done the demonstration well and didn't have to be held accountable to anyone. There is something in some areas where the notion of truth is somehow already given by what is done.

— Well, what happens is that we are talking about areas or disciplines in which taste counts and consecration circuits also influence.

- Of course, that's why.

- It's something different. You mentioned mathematics, tennis - which also appears quite a lot in your novel -, logic: they are very different universes from that of literature, right?

— Of course, but they have evaluation criteria that do not depend so much on what is opinionable, precisely. So it seems to me that is what gives value to the critic in literature, finally. And that is what somehow constitutes the tension that exists in the novel between the writer who thinks he has said something - and thinks he has said it more and more clearly - and that kind of mystery that slips into the novel of whether, indeed, there is something like that or is something ghostly, a mirage of the author.

— Something interesting in your novel has to do with this idea of the novel in code, from the roman à clef. There are permanent names, stories, anecdotes, phrases, words that one can recognize; there are titles of other novels that appear in the middle of the narration...

— Marcelo Chiriboga appears.

— And I was going to ask you, exactly, about Marcelo Chiriboga, who is the character created by Carlos Fuentes and José Donoso, two of the authors of the boom. I want you to tell me what happened to you with that character when you knew it was an invented character.

— And, this was when I read Donoso's The Garden Next Door, and I loved that idea and I also loved it as a way to make a little fun of the big figures of the boom. So, inventing an author whose only title is called The Imaginary Line seemed like a great literary joke to me. I didn't really know him before. It was a kind of joke of the time but as an inside joke of the authors of that time, too. Then, I found out what was the preparation for the writing of this novel. I read that wonderful book that is Those Years of the Boom, by Xavi Ayén. Not because the novel has to do with the boom, the novel takes place in a little later time, but it does have to do with the Barcelona of that time, with Carmen Balcells.

— And with Merton too, one of the protagonists and expert on the boom.

— Of course, he does his thesis on these authors. So, in the case of the other character, I was interested in an author who was immediately after those of the boom and who, therefore, did not get that wave of recognition that everyone else was on, but rather makes a somewhat more lonely path. And more doubtful in a way, not so acclaimed, let's say.

— Your character A. suffers from a disease, is prostrate. And he doesn't want to leave this life without someone reading the secret of his literature. Because A. feels like he's always been misread. Does Guillermo Martinez feel it was misread?

— No, the truth is that I have had excellent readers. I tell you more, it happened not long ago that I was having coffee, I got off a bicycle, and he came to tell me a number of things about my books that seemed extraordinary to me... That is, it has often happened to me that readers have read me very well and generously and sharply. And I don't think I have that kind of overview of the novels that I make as if they constitute a whole. That is also a little exaggerated idea. I think that no author has that kind of clarity throughout his life of developing work after work if it were in a program. There are procedures, recurrences, variations. But hey, this character takes to the extreme the idea that on the one hand a work can be built with absolute coherence and that, moreover, it is not understood. I was interested in finding that key, not leaving that open. And it was what I liked most when thinking about the novel, the possibility of thinking about a literary program beyond the fact that I didn't think of carrying it out. The possibility of saying: well, what could he have hidden - as the character of Nuria Monclús says - what this writer put into his books and find something that is interesting to some extent and that is not entirely predictable. That's why I wrote the novel as if it were a crime novel. My idea was that it could be read like a thriller.

— There is something like that, yes, and especially in the end, where to continue with the references there is even a kind of minimal scenario The Name of the Rose, a monastery that is also a reference. I mean, the novel is full of references. While you were writing it, did you imagine a critic or a critical reader taking note and saying “Oh, this is my eureka”?

— Exactly. I wanted to handle myself with that kind of fair play of the crime novel of intrigue. That is, that the reader would own the clues that appeared throughout the novel in order to be able to glimpse some possibility in the resolution before Merton, as a reader. Somehow, the reader of the novel would have to position himself as Merton, who is the young critic who has to discover the key.

— You just mentioned Nuria, character in your novel, which is clearly based as a character in Carmen Balcells.

“Of course, yes, yes, no doubt. In general, I don't take real people as models for my characters, but I make certain amalgams of different people or traits. But in this case, without a doubt, I wanted to portray, remember, somehow evoke the figure of Carmen Balcells because she seems to me to be a fictional character who was loose in the world. I remembered her phrases, ways, anecdotes. For example, an anecdote is told in which she questions a publisher about a book, a kind of debt that the publisher owes to her, and that scene I saw during a dinner. And the poor man turns all red and stutters and Carmen says to him: okay, but don't answer me yet. And he writes something on a piece of paper, folds it and says: now, yes. Then the editor releases an excuse such as “I haven't dealt with that matter”, and Carmen Balcells unrolls the paper on which she had written exactly that phrase seconds before. I mean, he had those kinds of tricks and he had queen's swings and queen gestures, too, then, without a doubt, he seemed like a character to me. I also had a very interesting way of speaking for me because I was a woman who was very used to dealing with books, some words were spoken in French, others in English, she splashed the conversation. Some of that I also wanted to put in my novel. Without being an overly educated woman, she was very astute and had a lot of common sense on some issues.

- It was the woman of the boom. She was the only woman in the boom, on the other hand. While the boom was made up of male writers and the one who represented them all was Carmen Balcells, right?

— And all the authors worshiped her, adored her... I say she was more adored than any lover by her authors... Another question I put is that of the Automata Museum and, somehow, I imagine a box with a hand that levitates and writes and I make the observation that the Balcells Agency for authors was like a structure that gave them doctors, lawyers, nannies, drivers, so that they dedicated themselves only to writing. Carmen Balcells has even given his authors salaries so that they only dedicate themselves to writing. So, naturally, for writers who generally have a relationship with the practical that is not always the best, it was a divinity in some sense.

- Yes, a strange form of patronage...

- Exactly, I had something of a patron. He had overwhelming generosity. I was taking you out to dinner, this is something I never saw anywhere else in the world. This is something quite Spanish: large gatherings where wines, drinks, meals are ordered. They sat down for lunch at two in the afternoon and got up at seven in the afternoon.

- As is, yes. Now, we are talking about the subject of authors and in the novel every time he prepares to read Merton proposes himself to separate author and work, which is something that is being talked about a lot at the moment, in times of the culture of cancellation. Is it possible to separate the author from the work?

— In my opinion, and I slip it a little into the character of Merton, not only is it possible but, for me, to appreciate the work, you have to separate them. Beyond the fact that one later learns that, well, such a scene had a kind of connection with some fact of life. Because from the point of view I would tell you epistemological, we know that what the authors do is maybe take something like a foot but that doesn't mean anything because precisely what they do next is to distort it, sharpen it, disfigure it. Abelardo Castillo used to say: my characters in books tend to hate the things I love” but hey, for different creative reasons one needs that kind of contrasts, of malevolence.

— The question also addresses, for example, what happens when there is a perpetrator accused of certain crimes, or not only accused but guilty of proven crimes or crimes or which, ideologically, were functional to movements that ended up being violent or killing people. In other words, how do we separate in that sense the work of art that we talked about before when we talked about taste and talked about circuits?

— Well, we know perfectly well that a large number of writers have had problems with the law, have confessed it or slipped it into their works. It seems to me that we must continue to separate. I mean, otherwise we can't read Céline. There's a scene where he practically rapes a woman. He counts it. Neruda also comments in his memoirs something that doesn't leave him standing very well. I don't know, Patricia Highsmith was a kleptomaniac, what are we going to do (laughs).

- (Laughter) But he wrote very well.

— But of course. But also, how can I tell you, I trust a little more in a police writer who has had a crime than in Sor Juana, if she started writing crime novels.

— In The Last Time Sex appears in A.'s novel, that last novel that Merton has to read, and also in the novel that frames that manuscript, that is, in two novels that the reader has before his eyes there are scenes related to sex and Nuria's character says that, precisely, the question of sex can reach mean problems with book sales and so on...

“No sex, suicide, yes,” he says.

— Exactly. And at one point it is said: how would A. feel if his novel was reduced to a sex novel? How would Guillermo Martinez feel if someone said: The last time is a sex novel?

— And, there is part of reason but I think I am incomplete. There are a hundred other topics that we were talking about earlier. In other words, it is a novel where there are some scenes that have to do with the sexual, but there is also a whole philosophical reflection on Hegel's logic, which is the feat that the philosophy professor tries at the end of his life. There are a number of reflections on what it means to read and how far to read books. There is everything we say about the montage of the literary scene and the different stages that a book goes through. There is the secret and more important theme for me that I perceive from novel to novel than the different interpretations that what is written gives rise to, is it not true? That is, there you have the two extremes, Umberto Eco's idea of an open work, where the reader appropriates the book and can interpret it in any way versus Edward Said's idea, for example, that you have to hierarchize, stick to the text, not every interpretation is equally valid, and so on. In a way, the question that underlies the novel is: can one get the right way in which the writer wants to be read only by what the text says? I mean, that's basically like “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”. And that is a topic that I have been dealing with since Imperceptible Crimes, which has to do with the paradox of the finite rules of Wittgenstein. I wear it in The Crimes of Alice with what is the true meaning of a foreign word, how to get to know if one came up with the true meaning of the foreign word. And with a number of issues. It's like a philosophical problem, which covers many areas. And here I incorporated it in the form of this kind of uncertainty that the writer has until the last moment, since he knows what he means but no one has yet managed to figure it out from his texts. When Merton takes the manuscript, he might say, “Look, you have to read this.” But he wants to know if that's in the text, right?

— Well, what one might also think is that, just as we say that books are completed in the readings, we can also say that there are writers who are looking for their reader. And everyone's encyclopedia, returning to Umberto Eco, is actually always his own. Which is very complicated. That is, one can be surprised by the reading of the other, but to imagine that it will be the same as the original purpose of one as a writer is complex or impossible.

— That's why there is the scene of the monastery. He goes to the monastery and finds A.'s library and apologizes to previous critics because how do you know everything that is in the head of an author, the books, the references, the struggles against influences, the variations, isn't it true? A writer has all that at the time of writing and for a reader... That's why I also put the Las Meninas room as a metaphor. There is also that discussion about the pictorial. In other words, when looking at a painting it is very difficult to infer what the artist's mental preparation for that painting was like. And it seems to me that the same thing happens with literature.

— There is a moment, when Nuria asks Merton to read that manuscript and tells him that A. does not want to die without someone recognizing what is underneath his texts, and says that it is what he called his watermark. And he also says: “The first time he told me about this I told him to leave all hope behind because reading is fatally a misunderstanding, everyone finds what he wants in a book”. And before I had told him: “writers are under every stone and critics with a novel hidden under his arm too, but someone like you, who reads with that rigor and doesn't have his ass rented, that's another song.” This is also interesting because he is talking about the critic as an author but also as the one who is there to unravel the enigma of another.

— Of course, the critic as a kind of supreme reader. In other words, it seems to me that it is a great intellectual task that of the critic, in that sense. The thing is that, in general, critics have their own novels, their own groups, as if to tell you: their own literary party. So, it's very difficult to find people who are proud to be only critical and who are dedicated to this kind of intellectual ambition that I put into character.

— Well, because there was also always that idea of the critic as the frustrated writer. Criticism is done with the same tools that writers work with, which is writing, and there is a huge difference with other criticism because art criticism is not done by painting. On the other hand, literary criticism is done by writing or speaking, with the word, the same tool as the object being criticized.

— Yes, but criticism has a lot to do with the essay, I would say. Then there was a whole idea of the critic as an artist, but the critics I appreciate the most are those who stick to the text and not those who want to develop a theory and pounce on the text to...

- Force it, of course.

— I am interested in criticism that goes from text to theory and that sticks to the text and not the one that takes the text as an excuse.

— As if to finish, then we would have this idea of the writers who seek to read what they wanted to say and the critics who force the texts to say what they think. Something like that.

— For me what is necessary is what I call, I wrote it in another novel, the refinement of dichotomous opposites. In other words, you can think of criticism as a number of dichotomous attributes, following the line of Italo Calvino in Six Problems for the Next Millennium. I often see critics as having their repertoire of positive attributes and automatically consider anything that doesn't fit that repertoire as negative. And, for me, we just have to let go of that critical mode. You have to go to each novel and see in each novel what the text says about these attributes, not pounce on the device already constituted.

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