Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

Chirbes went to Paris for a year and became a consummate Francophile, devouring all of Proust and declaring himself a “Proustian Leninist.” He read the maudits , Zola, saw the films of Renoir, Ophüls, Godard, listened to Debussy, Satie. “Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant are in me, they are in my novels, they are me. I admire Sartre and Camus in some books, but others are boring. I admit that Braudel is magisterial. I like Carrère’s Limonov and The Wound by Laurent Mauvignier.” From Paris he headed for the Morocco of Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, and Mohamed Choukri to teach the history of Moslem Spain in a school in Fez without knowing “a potato” of Arabic. Chirbes was searching elsewhere for paradise; Franco had died and the free-for-all atmosphere disturbed him. He quickly discovered Morocco was no nirvana either, but the experience spurred the writing of his first published novel, the alcohol-infused Mimoun . The novel oozes sexual tension and debauchery and an idea that “life is dirty, pleasure and pain sweat, excrete, smell. No human is anything more than a badly stitched sack of muck.” His life-long fascination with the work of painters like Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud should come as no surprise. His writing eventually worked into a style that broke with any conventional idea of realism; his sharp-edged hyper-realism moves into the poetic, the revealing detail so excruciatingly exact, existentially emblematic, that it becomes unbearable, searing. In his later novels, the aging human body serves as a symbol of the decadence and decay of the political and social body, too. It was the novelist Carmen Martín Gaite who first discovered his work. She sent the manuscript of Mimou to Jorge Herralde at Anagrama, who called immediately and encouraged Chirbes to present the novel for the Herralde prize. His debut was voted the runner-up. Herralde continued reassuring Chirbes at a crucial moment in his creative life, and Chirbes never forgot it. The relationship between writer and editor would last his lifetime and produce several novels and essay collections.

History for Rafael Chirbes was the key that opened his creative spigot, the present was the crystallization of the past and a writer was an antenna able to capture what Chateaubriand called an epoch’s esprit principe. He embraced Walter Benjamin’s concept of the moment of danger, “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. .. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. .. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Benjamin is one of the ghosts, the deceased writers that Chribes talked to, listened to: Cervantes, Tolstoy, Montaigne, Yourcenar, Lucretius, Virgil, Döblin, Faulkner, Eça de Quierós.

Chirbes had always been attracted to literature and cinema, but found the vastness of formal abstraction terrifying. History was a system, it tied things down and grounded them, brought things from the fanciful into an initial structure that allowed him to pose questions through literature and use the form of the novel to seek knowledge, to place an object in the light, to apprehend it long enough to distinguish its mechanics and intricacies. History was a boomerang — the past through the light of the present and its projection into the future. “You can’t see anything without history because if you don’t comprehend the evolution of things, you’ll never understand anything. Either you bear witness to your time, or you become a symptom of it.”

After returning to Spain, Chirbes settled into a tiny four-hundred-soul town in Badajoz, Extremadura. He wrote travel and culinary pieces to get by, but plunged into eleven years of fervent reading, rereading and writing. By night, he would frequent the town’s profusion of bars and argue with the local socialists about how the cause had been sold for a few measly government contracts. He produced a fine second novel, En la lucha final , and a third, La buena letra , written in the feminine voice against the “new pragmatism” which he said could be summed up perfectly in a phrase by Deng Xiaoping: “Black cat, white cat, what does it matter, as long as it hunts rats.” He wanted his storytelling to pierce the marrow of the transition, hit that quivering moment when the scales balance and the novel finds its vantage point, its aura, firing an infinitude of meanings. “Beautiful penmanship is a costume for lies,” his protagonist laments. Chirbes believed that literature is like a lover, either you go all the way or you’ll be left alone.

When his fifth novel, La larga Marcha , came out in 1996 it became a casus belli among certain sectors of the critical apparatus in Spain. It was translated into German, and the critic Reich-Ranicki melted into a paroxysm of accolades, establishing Chirbes as the “model to follow” for the great German novel that was coming. It was “the book that Europe needed.” Chirbes became an instant bestseller there, winning prizes and a veritable phenomenon. For many years his most ardent readership was German while in Spain he was still a “cult” writer. “I’m not a priest or a politician, I’m not writing to console readers, but to awaken contradictions and disquiet.” This is part and parcel of what made Rafael Chirbes the consummate outsider in Spanish letters, the prickly, unrelenting social conscience of his generation: his was an intimate knowledge of the age-old underbelly of the human condition, he knew that victims become executioners and “no human being can be considered free of guilt.” In this he echoed Camus’s famous dictum: “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” It’s what suffuses his work with its potent edge, its sense of urgency and grit. For years he was described as a “secret” writer, which in Spain is often a euphemism to describe someone emerging from the underclasses, but as he well knew, eventually the readers are the ones to decide who is a great author, not the establishment. Chirbes the reader’s writer, Chirbes the witness of his time, Chirbes the historian: he always understood the artistic act as an ethical one, and the novel as a potent artifact for describing a particular time and place on earth, as a microcosmic representation, as a fractal, of the universal.

Novel after novel, Chirbes continued pushing form, experimenting, and became one of the greatest prose stylists of the language, forging new and original forms to renovate the boundless European tradition of social realism, adding modern, original twists to the sweeping fresco style of writers like Galdós, Balzac or Musil. Early in the new century, Rafael Chirbes returned to the Levante of his childhood, and found a solitary home in the small town of Beniarbeig, Alicante, living as a near recluse with his two dogs and two cats (he had been afraid of dogs earlier in life, and one can follow their presence throughout his novels). His tipping point came in 2007 with Crematorio , his eighth novel and a force to be reckoned with, like it or not. By now it was too dangerous for the establishment to flaunt ignorance of a writer of such a categorical stature. However uncomfortably, even the audacious few establishmentarians who still believe that history can keep a secret, yes, even they were forced to pay attention — the man isn’t going away and he writes like the devil. And Chirbes’s work proves that history cannot keep a secret. A tepidly conceded finalist for the City of Barcelona Prize that year, Crematorio landed the wildly applauded National Critic’s Award. It was about time. The novel was then adapted to television, becoming one of Spain’s most successful series ever.