Javier Marias - The Man of Feeling

Manur puts on his glasses and turns to glance at the television which has nothing of interest to offer him; then he looks outside again: the Madrid sky, a plane in which I will no longer be afraid to fly, the street, the square, the women going out all dressed up, the cars in their many colors. This is not his country. His cognac-colored eyes stare out calmly and deliberately through his glasses: they no longer skim rapidly over or feel flattered by the things of the world. Manur turns off the television and switches on the light in the bathroom, in whose mirror he catches a fleeting glimpse of himself— his robust self — but he does not stop. He smoothes his few hairs without realizing that he is doing so. He urinates with the door open, he still has his jacket on. He goes back into the room, he watches the evening as it falls. He sits down and waits for night to come. He does not smell of anything. My day is over and I feel sleepy, I wonder what I will dream about tonight when I put down this pen and go to bed alone. My consciousness is accustomed to remaining alert (gennaio, agosto, novembre). Manur looks at his hand in the shadows. Then, sitting down, dressed to go out, he feels a desire to destroy himself. My hand is in the shadows. But don't worry, I would be incapable of following his example.

The Man of Feeling has its origins in two images: the first could well belong not so much to the real world as to an illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights or to one of the film versions made of Emily Bronte's novel. The image depicts a man and a woman standing in a rural landscape and separated by a fence. They are talking, perhaps having just met, or perhaps saying goodbye. This image, however, does not appear in my book; it served only as a stimulus, it was — to use Nabokov's expression — its first throb. The second image is drawn from the real world and is there in the early part of the book: traveling by train from Milan to Venice, I spent three hours sitting opposite a woman who corresponded exactly to the moral and physical description that the reader will find a few pages into the book. When I started writing the novel, that was almost all I had, that and the opening sentence.

This is how I usually work. I need to feel my way forwards, and nothing would bore me or put me off more than knowing, when I start a novel, precisely what it will be: the characters who will people it, when and how they will appear or disappear, what will become of their lives or of the fragment of their lives that I am going to recount. All this happens as I am actually writing the novel and belongs to the realm of invention in its etymological sense of discovering or stumbling upon something; there are even moments when I stop and see opening up before me two possible, and totally opposed, ways of continuing the story. Once the book is finished — that is, once the discovery has been made, and once the book exists in the particular way that publication makes immutable — it seems impossible that it could ever have been any different. Then one believes that one can talk about it, even explain it, using other words than those used in the book itself, as if those words were not suitable for all circumstances.

The Man of Feeling is a love story in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered. Can such a thing happen? Can something as urgent and unpostponable as love, which requires both presence and immediate consummation or consumption, be announced when it does not yet exist or truly remembered if it no longer exists? Or does the announcement itself and mere memory— now and still respectively — form part of that love? I don't know, but I do believe that love is based in large measure on its anticipation and on its recollection. It is the feeling that requires the largest dose of imagination, not only when one senses its presence, when one sees it coming, and not only when the person who has experienced and lost love feels a need to explain it to him or herself, but also while that love is evolving and is in full flow. Let us say it is a feeling which always demands an element of fiction beyond that afforded by reality. In other words, love always has an imaginary side to it, however tangible or real we believe it to be at any given moment. It is always about to be fulfilled, it is the realm of what might be. Or, rather, of what might have been.

This is the realm inhabited by the characters in The Man of Feeling: we are witnesses to those fragments of their stories during which — through anticipation or memory — they are obliged to live with love either when they do not yet have it or when they have already lost it. The difference between the two principal male characters lies in the fact that while one of them is not prepared to make do with that imaginary, projected, fictitious dimension, and takes the necessary steps to replace the love only glimpsed with a love lived (to have his love fulfilled), the other character, the true man of feeling, has accepted — patiently, though not resignedly — that imaginary, unilateral route and has staked his life on it. To the former, the end of his love will not prove so very terrible — as, indeed, is the case for most people in present-day society — because from the moment he chooses reality, or, if you prefer, fulfilment, he has automatically chosen the point of view of memory, which makes all things bearable. However, when the other man loses his unfulfilled love (as he perceives it), he is forced to abandon the true realm of love, that of possibility and the imagination. And it is that loss, above all, that drives him to despair.

In the middle is a female character, Natalia Manur, who is shown in the novel in a very diffuse way, as if through a veil. She is only seen clearly on one occasion, at the start of the book, asleep, just as I saw that woman on the Milan-Venice train. This might seem surprising, given that she is also one of the main characters, but she belongs perhaps to that long line of fictional women (like Penelope, like Desdemona, like Dulcinea and so many others of less illustrious ancestry) whose existence is largely symbolic: they present the greatest danger to those who come into contact with them, as the narrator of The Man of Feeling seems to acknowledge: "For, as I well know," he says, "the most effective and lasting subjugations are based on pretence or, indeed, on something that has never existed." One wonders if the narrator meant to add: "or on something unfulfilled."

— Javier Marias, March 1987