A year and a half ago, Julià de Jòdar (Badalona, ??1942) brought together in L’atzar i les ombres (Comanegra) the trilogy of novels in which the reader had seen Gabriel Caballero grow up, and which now continues in La casa tapiada (Comanegra). , where he travels between 1962 and 1977 with excursions that extend beyond the pandemic confinement. The story comes to us through a narrator who is supposed to be his unknown son, who makes Caballero’s biography from materials that Mr. Lotari has gathered, who had reviewed his literary career and, without knowing who writes what , sends us a lot of testimonies that portray the era and the protagonist in a kaleidoscopic way, while announcing a future installment that could close the cycle.
Did you conceive the book before revising the trilogy into one volume?
I had always wanted to finish the story of Gabriel Caballero until he dies, but the initial project of making more trilogies was crazy for a novice and it couldn’t be, too many elements could confuse the reader.
And prepare a continuation…
Yes, The Resurrecció of the Flesh, but in The Walled House it also says that it will be called Les nits en blanc. Which one will come out? It depends on whether Julià de Jòdar continues to lend the name to Caballero, but if he has died, why do we have to continue lending him the name?
It balances between the attempt to explain an era and the assumption of fiction. Swim and put away clothes.
That seems like a biography, there is no narrating voice. There is a man who gathers materials by collecting voices and he dies when he had to start editing it, and then another man appears who says that he is the son of the biographer, but we do not know if it is true, it may be or not. The latter gathers the materials, edits them, puts notes and documents on each page, but in the end he is the one who has the last word. Are we sure that the documents and materials he uses are what he says they are? Those who are historical can go searching in the archives, but those who are not, perhaps they are evidence of himself as a writer. It is a palimpsest of things that come and go and are erased and rewritten: be careful with memory, official, historical and individual. We are playing with all the elements that make up what will later be the story, orthodox or not, of an era.
The game will always be about at what point Gabriel Caballero is Julià de Jòdar.
Who is Julià de Jodar? Perhaps it is Gabriel Caballero’s pseudonym for writing novels.
It portrays the time and Caballero from many voices. Are you trying to confuse the reader, making it difficult for them to identify who is speaking?
Yes, and a good part of the testimonies are presented with pseudonyms, because they have respectable families and they do not want them to know things about their slightly painful or compromised past. There are moments that are nuclear in themselves, because to a certain extent it had to be another trilogy and it is condensed into a single novel. The character is kaleidoscopic because the era is also kaleidoscopic. Rising middle classes coexist through the industry with intellectuals that García Valdecasas has thrown out of the university, and they coincide with people who do theater killing themselves like crazy, almost adolescent creatures who do six hours of rehearsals to represent Espriu.
Did you have a good time creating Caballero’s texts that you have as materials in your archive?
I have had a lot of fun making these literary sections and intermediates, it has allowed me to develop very different styles between them. There is a story, El somni de la gauche divine, for example, that is absolutely surreal, senseless, but which reflects very well the nature of that world.
There is period documentation, partly as Eduard Márquez did in 1969 (L’Altra Editorial) but here some are real and others created expressly, always within a fictional framework.
It’s just that I was there. For example, when he talks about the assault on the rectorate in 1969, it is not done with documents, but live and direct, well, it was Gabriel Caballero. It is immediate and direct experience. The book is built on lived realities, which I lend to Caballero gratis et amore.
It is said that a certain Julià de Jòdar was the “really good” writer!
Because he was a secret writer. Caballero takes advantage of his friendship with Julià de Jòdar and borrows her name, saying “as you are a secret writer and will not publish, leave me your literary name.” It’s a loan that I make to him, and he returns it to me in the form of footers and so on.
Character and author go through the factory, then comes the theater and reaches clandestine politics, with everything at the same time very open and very closed.
We were the ones who knew each other, that endogamy is real, surviving in hiding required it. The thing involved a few bosses, a few names and a few organizations, and the true litmus test for any group that wanted to prosper was to reach what they called the masses.
Is your novel more political?
It was not the intention, since the pretext is the character’s bibliography. One of the characteristics of this guy is that he tries everything, takes what interests him and then turns it into whatever he wants, but he is no leader.
He is somewhere between charismatic and a poor man.
He has systematic doubts about his own value, about how he would exercise power if he had it, he does not trust himself, with impulses that tend to be authoritarian.
It progresses like a chronological story and at the same time goes up and down in time.
There is a moment in which the story accelerates, basically when someone asks him what he thinks about May 68. The character doubts so much that the next voice assures that he is an impostor, as if saying that everyone reconstructs history in their own way. . To a certain extent, it is also an investigation between the search for historical truth or historical memory and the specific vicissitudes of specific people who each have lived in their own way and have a memory and have a conscience, and have a vision. . From the vision of this world, the historian perhaps would not know where to start, the ordinary reader who has not lived it will say, “My, what a time! “It doesn’t surprise me that we are the way we are.” The dialectic between memory and truth, between interpretation of the world and lived realities, with this character who comes and goes and leads us through the voices through the meanders of history, gives dynamics and pulls the book. Also between the conformism of an era, because it is in full Francoism in many moments, and the transition to post-Francoism, but the rest is an enormously constrained and controlled society, although it seems that the characters have lived with some apparent, internal freedoms, which they do not They did not correspond to the reality of the time according to official reality either.
He writes that Caballero, “to become a writer, because he did not have the gift, he had to work at it all his life.” Is this how Julià de Jòdar feels too? Like the character, he was “slow maturing.”
Julià de Jòdar has the feeling that he has been writing his entire life alone in his brain and that he has then been watching it as a continuous tape. As if instead of living life he had been continually putting it into a narrative, which you keep in your brain and then it comes out. We’ll see what’s left, and I don’t know what remains there will be next time.
He explains how they were going to give classes about Mao or communism to the people.
It was an objective necessity. There were very young people, very fighting, very broken by factory work, which was tremendous, and the anti-capitalist world comes out of this type of suffering, real suffering of people who have to get up at half past five, who have to go do some physically abusive, exhausting days. These very combative people fought in the factory at a level of immediacy. But they needed training, people to prepare them. They were people who were enormously receptive to anything that gave them a vision of the world, a culture, a way of trying to grasp reality beyond the factory. People who lived in towns in Vallès, Baix Llobregat, places where there was social life and cultural life, and they did what they could. This need was met by very willing and very optimistic intellectuals in the face of historical reality. It was a necessary job and I wouldn’t make fun of it, they were not dreamers. Now it would also be good for us if people were trained.
Doesn’t the school do it?
It is supposed to be done by school, college, university, but above all social networks do it, at this moment. It is an almost endogamous and self-referential, self-justifying self-formation. So there was still an intermediate step between those who had been lucky enough to learn things either because their family could pay for university or because they had the desire to learn and this type of will of the intellectual of the time to know that they had to fight, too. And fighting also meant getting kicked out of the university, and it meant going to clandestine meetings to explain certain things. The concrete work of many intellectual people of that time is worthy of admiration for me.
Today it seems that the intellectual is dedicated to making tweets.
When you talk about the crisis we are experiencing now on a cosmic scale and compare it with May 68, you see the enormous distance traveled and the enormous setback in so many things. I of the time do not make a caricature or a hagiography. There was that search for the truth of each person but socially considered, not only in a private capacity.
At the end of his life, Caballero wants to return to Badalona to build a work museum…
…which is a museum to himself and his exaltation. Gabriel Caballero’s problem is the problem of narcissistic personalities, who make a projection of what they want others to be.
Like the novel, which is a projection for the brilliance of its author?
I find it fantastic. I have no problem with them saying that. They already said that it was a display of literary powers, and I accept it, although without exhibitionism, either.
Catalan version, here
