Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

With every curve the bus took on the Auedamm, the strength of the invisible push carried me mentally further along. I felt at times an almost subconscious joy and now I imagined sitting at my table in the Dschingis Khan, making sure Autre wrote something about how radical solitude drives some people to an anguish of such proportions, it makes them wish the world produced something more than just anguish, perhaps something we don’t yet know and have to seek at all costs.

The new, perhaps?

I remembered Chesterton said that there was one thing that gave radiance to everything. It was the idea of something around the corner. Perhaps it is this desire for something more that propels us to seek the new, to believe something exists that can still be distinct, unseen, special, something different, around the most unexpected corner; that’s why some of us have spent our whole lives wanting to be avant-garde, because it is our way of believing that in the world, or maybe beyond it, out beyond the poor world , there might be something we’ve never seen before. And because of this, some of us reject the repetition of what has been done before; we hate them telling us the same as always, trying to make us know things all over again that we know so much about already; we loath the realist and the rustic, or the rustic and the realist, who think the task of the writer is to reproduce, copy, imitate reality, as if in its chaotic evolution, its monstrous complexity, reality could be captured and narrated. We are amazed by writers who believe that the more empirical and prosaic they are, the closer they get to the truth, when in fact the more details you pile up, the further that takes you away from reality; we curse those who prefer to ignore risk, just because they are afraid of loneliness and getting it wrong; we scorn those who don’t understand that the greatness of a writer lies in his promise, guaranteed in advance, of failure; we love those who swear that art lies solely in this attempt.

It is the desire for there to be something more and this desire leads us without fail always to seek out the new. And this endeavor, this eagerness, this toil —I started to use this word I found and liked in some lines by Yeats — this toiling was something that was in me since those summers of my youth and is still there; I think it is my center, the very essence of my way of being in the world, my stamp, my watermark: I’m talking about that ongoing concern for seeking the new, or believing that the new can perhaps exist, or finding that newness which was always there.

There is eagerness in this voice that speaks for me when they ask me about the world.

“The world?” I say. “No, just art.”

“Why?”

“Because art intensifies the feeling of being alive.”

The new, I imagined making Autre write at his table in the Chinese restaurant, was what some sought to align themselves with, taking the most advanced positions on the “literary battlefield.” These vanguard positions exercised a fascinating power over some writers. Innately optimistic, they thought that from those positions where they were making an unexpectedly intense search, they might perhaps find the only possible way out of their existential angst.

In fact, all known great novels are avant-garde in a way, in the sense that they bring something new to the history of literature. Dickens, for example, never presumed to be avant-garde, nor would he have wanted to be, but he was; he was because he changed the course of literature, while many presented themselves to literary society, putting on avant-garde airs and never innovating a thing.

I was wrapped up in all this when, next to my table in the Dschingis Khan, in my imagination, someone pointed a finger at me and said right beside me: “Look at him. He has an avant-garde world, a Duchamp’s widow’s world.”

I felt not in the least ashamed of this, and anyway, it was only in my imagination. As far as real life was concerned, I was still on the bus. The rain continued to fall, relentlessly punishing that labyrinthine geography of the outskirts.

I imagined again that I decided to go into the Chinese restaurant and, over the course of the next hour, instead of getting bored doing nothing or sitting writing about noncommunication as the fun-loving Autre would have done, I devoted myself to spying on what an almost hundred-year-old couple sitting beside me was saying — the two of them really were very ancient — and also to interpreting a conversation between a Vietnamese cook and her boyfriend, a young man who was probably Austrian, plus the discussion between two Chinese waiters who were commenting in a very veiled way on the chat they’d had some weeks earlier with a writer who’d sat where I was sitting.

I also imagined suddenly returning from a quick visit to the restroom. I was shocked to see the guy with the crackpot air about him beside my table, that nuisance by the name of Serra from the day before. Under normal circumstances, I would have run straight out of there, but that morning I imagined being so disposed to finding life and the world interesting that, imitating the calmness of the Vietnamese woman’s boyfriend, I sat down mildly beside the loon, who appeared to have something more interesting about him than the day before.

“What brings you here, good fellow?” I said.

“I went back to the Sanatorium and they haven’t fixed what’s out of order.”

I offered him my sympathy with a few words that gave the impression I was agreeing to take on his clinical case. And, of course, I was immediately alarmed. I realized I had to tread very carefully, unless I wanted my participation in Documenta to consist of setting up a confessional at my table with its vase.

That scenic picture of “doctor and patient” had something of the installation about it but little that was avant-garde. It was also clear you couldn’t expect much from Autre either, his being a conservative writer. Thinking about all this led me to finally take Autre’s place and put in an appearance myself. With a swipe, I knocked the vase to the floor, pricked up my ears, and asked the crackpot to tell me his problem. The Chinese waiter came over and complained about the broken vase, but whatever he was spluttering was the only thing I didn’t manage to translate all morning, nor can I say I was terribly interested in his reproaches.

To start off, the mustachioed Serra held back and asked what problem I was talking about. He said he didn’t have any and asked whether I had perhaps forgotten he was a success. But it wasn’t long before he crumbled. It was a trivial thing he had to tell me, he ended up confessing, but it had stopped him from doing anything his whole life.

“I collapse. .” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I collapse what is the fact of Galileo, but it is obvious he escaped here the contribution of Kepler. .”

He was speaking like a Google translation into Catalan. And what he said was strange, too, assuming he was actually saying something. He was talking like a bad translation, but also like a Cheyenne Indian; the fact was, he spoke in a very disjointed manner, or at least in a way that seemed so. Looking at it from another perspective, his language was reminiscent of the jargon peculiar to psychoanalysts in the seventies, Lacanian jargon in particular.

I saw with a measure of dismay that noncommunication between two people was an even more catastrophic matter than I’d imagined and also that this type of problem interested Autre more than it did me. I was at the point of letting the conservative writer come back to the brazier table and staying on myself only in the capacity of rigorous observer, but in the end I preferred it to be me who attended the case, essentially an interesting one, because when all was said and done everything before me that morning was exciting. I found the good in it all and didn’t stop appreciating what I saw the world was offering me. I felt it wasn’t life I loved, but living; it seemed that those who did not experience delight in things showed little accomplishment, just as Democritus had once said: “Fools live without feeling joy in life.”