Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

Closing the parentheses, I returned to the afternoon in the Flore with Sophie Calle, when she invited me to imitate Syrus and Petronius, and I immediately accepted her proposal to write a story that she would try to live.

Then I talked about Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, of my friendship with her and my small collaborations with some of her installations, such as the one she did in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, where she depicted an apocalyptic London in the year 2054.

Although in fits and starts, I was delivering a lecture, and figured I’d filled about half my time, when I suddenly started to feel an indescribable emotion: given the excitation of my mood, I was communicating to everyone my great enthusiasm for this glorious moment of contemporary art.

As I spoke, I felt noticeably more and more authentic. And I seemed to see in a very obvious way that calling myself Piniowsky had made me reencounter my own self and that my previous name, my name of so many years, had come to be a huge burden to me, because in reality it was nothing more than the name from a youth that had gone on too long.

The entire audience was either confused or calm, except for young Kassel, who was fidgeting in her seat in the back row and seemed increasingly restless; she looked disappointed and I didn’t know why, though I feared it was because she grasped too well the lack of rigor in my extremely improvised talk. But I was not prepared to modify the method I was employing to communicate with my audience, who, by the way, seemed only to be listening to me to try to figure out what the hell I was talking about. Maybe they thought I was on drugs: I might have looked it, because my enthusiasm bordered on the supernatural.

Trying to keep my distance from what the madwoman or the rest of the audience might be thinking, I devoted myself to narrating the infinitely profound impression that William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions had made on me; most especially, the treatment of the characters had left a strange trace on me, particularly one of them, a certain Wyatt who suddenly stopped being Wyatt to hide beneath the name of Reverend Gilbert Sullivan, and later behind the name of a certain Yak, who soon went on to be called Stephan (though only somewhat later do we recognize him by that name).

Could we say that Wyatt was Wyatt at every moment? Was it the same Wyatt in each part of The Recognitions ?

I asked this question, and as I did so, I looked up for a moment and saw that the audience was looking more and more astounded, as if wanting to warn me not to carry on down that path.

“Wyatt!” shouted Kassel from the back row, and I’d never heard a shout inviting less logic.

Even so, I carried on. I began to talk about contemporary writers, about those I claimed could all be called Wyatt and had supposedly inherited the sacred flame of literature, but only on rare occasions could we see that they were indeed Wyatt. To explain such a huge debacle, I said, we had to talk about the abandonment of moral responsibilities on the part of all living writers, but that argument, not necessarily wrong, was insufficient to explain so much desertion and disaster. It was quite true that at present all contemporary writers, instead of taking up positions against capitalism, were working in tune with it; they were all well aware they were nothing if they didn’t sell books or if dozens of admirers didn’t show up when they signed copies of their novels. It was no less true that liberal democracies, by tolerating everything, absorbing everything, made any text futile, no matter how dangerous it might appear to be. .

Here I stopped because I felt on the verge of asphyxiation; I’d suddenly been talking in a sort of compulsive outburst. I’d felt extremely uncomfortable at every moment as well, especially since I detected the absolutely false tone of my melancholy: I had wanted to deploy a sullen discourse, as I tended to do lately when I made literature, and I simply felt like a faker speaking so sadly.

When I regained my composure, I made a humorous allusion to “Collapse and Recovery,” explaining that more than once during the days I’d spent in Kassel, I had physically played out Documenta’s motto.

Then I talked about Paul Thomas Anderson’s film The Master , which I’d seen the first day of that month at the Venice Film Festival, and which had impressed me with its moving description of people who were lost, unable to recover after the Second World War.

The Master brilliantly described the mental climate of recovery. I would undoubtedly think of this film if one day I had to write about finding in Kassel these optimal circumstances that allowed me to leave behind a creative collapse and enter into a process of Recovery, leading me to mental spaces where euphoria sometimes seemed limitless. Then I spoke briefly — dispensing with any taciturn tone that might sound false — about some of the works at Documenta that had helped me rethink my writing, concentrating especially on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s installation in the woods, FOREST (for a thousand years) .

I spoke about this work and the random subversive groups it created, how I’d been overcome by the impression of being on a battlefield hearing, as if it were all happening right there, the yells of men in hand-to-hand combat, the overflying airplanes, the breathing, real footsteps through dry leaves, the nervous laughter, the wind, twigs snapping in the densest part of the forest, thunder of an approaching storm, the noise of ancient battles, bayonets tearing through the air, consternation. .

And in the background of it all, I said, an obsessive song warns us that to get out of the forest, we have to get out of Europe, but to get out of Europe, we have to get out of the forest.

If these last words of my lecture had suddenly blended with the glacial, heartrending cry of young Kassel, everything would have been perfect.

But it didn’t go like that; I looked toward young Kassel and she was simply scratching her head.

The floor was opened for a discussion, which was soon closed. There were no questions and only Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev took the floor to tell me in French that the whole lecture had struck her as “Martian.”

She didn’t specify whether she meant “admirably Martian” or just Martian, but since my joy and frenzy for life were ongoing, I chose to take it as a compliment.

Hours later in the hotel, I would read on the Internet in English, without understanding any of it, a summary of that lecture written by someone on the Documenta payroll. The Spanish version supplied by Google Translate was strange, as was to be expected, but it helped me to believe that I really had delivered a lecture in Kassel, even if, according to what it said, it wasn’t exactly the lecture I’d planned to deliver, but a slightly different one:

A literary analysis of the event of the lecture by the Catalan writer could only fairly be said to have demonstrated the potential of a resourceful event like the Ständehaus, where an insomniac has spoken to demanding listeners calling for shortwave radio headphones. In the medium term, you can expect the Catalan writer to publish from behind prison bars his account of his flâneuresque steps through Kassel and his Chinese home, and infamous adhesion to a subversive breeze.

In Untilled , one had the experience of not knowing whether one was stepping on a work of art, or whether it was all real or imaginary. I felt the same way leaving the Ständehaus and saying farewell to the whole curatorial team that had gathered there. I found out from Chus that they’d arranged for a taxi to take me to the Frankfurt airport the next morning so I could avoid the train.