I didn’t see the interview with Juana Dolores (El Prat de Llobregat, 1992) on Xavier Graset’s program and then I was too lazy to retrieve it. Now that I’ve seen it, I have to say that both were very good. Dolores, short and direct. Graset, understanding and dialogic, I think he had a lot of patience. A couple of days ago I read him a tweet in which he said that more has been written about the Catalan Requiem than any of the works of philosophy and thought that are published. It’s the world we live in, with trumpet blasts.
There are a couple of things I would like to comment on. The first is the drift of part of the literary creation in Catalan towards the field of contemporary art. There is another line, parallel to this one, that comes out of comparative literature studies. For this to happen is a fantastic thing. Instead of sticking to known ideas and approved styles, Catalan literature seeks new paths. Given the country we have and the readers there, it’s like a miracle. But contemporary art has unwritten laws that, when transferred to literature, cause the phenomenon we live in: rather opaque books, with little communicative capacity, accompanied by theories garnished with big names. And the idea that the artist is much smarter than the viewers, in this case, than the readers. Which places him in a position of superiority – intellectual and, sometimes, moral -. This breaks what we could call the pact between author and reader that has been maintained since the Renaissance, based on a correspondence of interests.
The other aspect that caught my attention from the Més 324 interview and the reading of the Requiem is the reference to spirits. Now there is a highly acclaimed novel where spirits are also protagonists. Concrete people disappear from the books, replaced by shadows, presences of a world that was not at all, abstract essences, regrets. “There are treasures on the mountain tops and a word under the lake. Would you disobey the hints of the clouds? Would you disobey the insinuations of a ray of sunshine?” It’s a well-known song.
The book that has caused so much noise is the libretto of a piece of cultured music. Juana Dolores wrote the text and Marc Migó, who commissioned it, the music. Migó has also written the lengthy text that explains the entire operation in the book published by Edicions Poncianes (which reaches its second edition this week). It made me think of that idea by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word when he said that in museums the theories should be exhibited and the works placed next to them, the size of a poster. There is also a series of photographs, Sovereign Landscapes. A nation is not imaginary, it is imagined, with the artistic direction of Rosa Tharrats, and with the intervention of several collaborators. Dolores acts there, in vedette. There are good ones and some that make you laugh a little. Years ago, at a Sant Jordi award, Miriam Tey appeared in a dress with four bars, sewn by Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada. Years ago, Carles Pazos also made a collage of the Snowflake with the Mother of God of Montserrat on his lap. Tharrats has painted the four bars on the naked body of Dolores with the Mother of God of Montserrat in her hands, in a comic synthesis. He was fine in the interview when he said that these photos of the four painted bars were the ones he likes least because he finds them obvious.
The Requiem is a text full of force and bad milk, sometimes a little sketchy. I suppose that this schematism is due, in large part, to the fact that it is a piece to be performed or sung. A manifestation of a justified rage that manifests itself in an esoteric and modern way. We’ve ditched the shield and spear and replaced them with streamers, confetti and pretty words. Catalonia has not managed to be a diamond: it is an abstinent nation, stripped of seduction, hyper-mirrored. Against this soft and scarred Catalonia (one of those out there), Juana Dolores casts her spell.
