A year and a half ago, Julià de Jòdar (Badalona, ??1942) brought together in L’azar 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 made a journey between 1962 and 1977 with excursions that arrived after the pandemic confinement. The story comes to us through a narrator who is supposed to be his unknown son, who makes a biography of Caballero based on materials collected by Mr. Lotari, who had traced his literary career and, without knowing who write what, he brings us a lot of testimonies that portray the era and the protagonist in a kaleidoscopic way, while also 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 Gabriel Caballero’s story until he died, but the initial project to make more trilogies was a novice’s madness and it couldn’t be, too many elements could confuse the reader.
And prepare a sequel…
Yes, The Resurrection of the Flesh, but in The Walled House it also says it will be called The White Nights. 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 should we continue to lend him the name?
It swings between the pretense of explaining an era and the assumption of fiction. Swim and store clothes.
This looks like a biography, there is no voiceover. There is a gentleman who gathers materials by collecting voices and we die when he had to start editing it, and then another gentleman appears who says he is the son of the person being biographed, which we also don’t know if it’s true, it could be or no. The latter collects the materials, edits them, puts notes and documents on each page, but in the end he has the last word. Are we sure that the documents and materials he uses are what he says they are? Those that are historical can be found in the archives, but those that are not, may be evidence of himself as a writer. It is a palimpsest of things that enter and leave and are erased and rewritten: be careful with memory, with the official, with the historical and with the individual. We are playing with all the elements that make up what will later be the story, orthodox or not, of an era.
There will always be the game about how much Gabriel Caballero is Julià de Jòdar.
Who is Julià de Jodar? Maybe it’s Gabriel Caballero’s pseudonym for writing novels.
It portrays the era and Caballero from many voices. Are you trying to confuse the reader, making it difficult for him to identify who is speaking?
Yes, and many of the witnesses present themselves with pseudonyms, because they have respectable families and they do not want them to know things about their past, rather a bit sleazy or compromised. There are moments that are nuclear in themselves, because to some extent it was supposed to be another trilogy and it is condensed into a single novel. The character is kaleidoscopic because the era is also kaleidoscopic. Middle classes rising through industry co-exist with intellectuals that García Valdecasas has made out of university, and they coincide with theater people killing themselves like crazy, almost adolescent creatures who do six hours of rehearsals to perform spry
Did he have a good time making Caballero’s texts that he puts as materials in his archive?
I had a lot of fun making these literary interludes and interludes, it allowed me to develop very different styles. There is a story, El somni de la gauche divine, for example, which 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 in a fictional framework.
I was there. For example, when he talks about the assault on the rectory in 1969, it is not done with documents, but live and direct, well, Gabriel Caballero was there. It is immediate and direct experience. The book is built a lot 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 his name saying “since you are a secret writer and will not publish, leave me your literary name”. It’s a loan I make to him, and he returns it to me in the form of footers and such.
Character and author pass through the factory, then comes the theater and reaches underground politics, with everything at the same time very open and closed.
We were the ones who knew each other, this inbreeding is real, surviving in hiding demanded it. It went through a few bosses, a few names and a few organizations, and the real litmus test for any group that wanted to prosper was to reach what they called the masses.
Is it your most political novel?
It was not the pretense, since the pretext is the bibliography of the character. One of the characteristics of this guy is that he tries everything, takes what interests him and then turns it into what he wants, but he is no leader.
He is somewhere between charismatic and a bit of a pain.
He has systematic doubts about his own worth, about how he would exercise power if he had it, he does not trust himself, and has rather authoritarian impulses.
It moves forward like a chronological story and at the same time goes up and down in time.
There is a moment when the story accelerates, basically when someone asks him what he thinks of May 68. This character is so dubious that the following voice assures him that he is an impostor, as if saying that everyone reconstructs the history of their way To some extent, it is also an investigation between the search for historical truth or historical memory and the specific avatars of specific people who have each lived in their own way and have a memory and have a consciousness, and have a vision. From the vision of this world, the historian might not know where to start, the ordinary reader who has not lived through it will say, “my mother, what an era! I’m not surprised 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 meanderings of history, gives dynamic and strip of 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, while it seems that the characters have lived with apparent, internal freedoms, which also did not correspond to the reality of the time according to the official reality.
He writes that Caballero, “to become a writer, because he didn’t have the gift, he had to work for it all his life”. Does Julià de Jòdar feel the same way? Like the character, it was “slow maturation”.
Julià de Jòdar has the feeling that all his life he has been writing it alone in his brain and that he has then been watching it like a continuous tape. As if instead of living life I had been continuously 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 in the next one.
He explains how they were going to teach people about Mao or communism.
It was an objective necessity. There were very young people, very fighting, very torn by factory work, which was tremendous, and the anti-capitalist world comes out of this kind of suffering, real suffering of people who have to get up at half past six, that he has to go and do some physically abusive, exhausting days. These very combative people were fighting in the factory at a level of immediacy. But they needed training, people to prepare them. They were enormously receptive people to anything that gave them a vision of the world, a culture, a way of trying to grasp reality beyond the factory. They were people who lived in towns in the Vallès, in the Baix Llobregat, places where there was social life and cultural life, and they did what they could. This need was covered by intellectuals who were very voluntaristic and very optimistic about the historical reality. It was a necessary job and I wouldn’t ironize it, they weren’t dreamers. Now it would also be good for us if people were trained.
What doesn’t the school do?
It is supposed to be done by the school, the high school, the university, but especially the social networks, at this moment. It is an almost inbred and self-referential, self-justifying self-formation. Then there was still an intermediate step between those who had been lucky enough to learn things or because the family could pay for university or because they had a desire to learn and this kind of will of the intellectual of the time of knowing he had to fight, too. And fighting also meant getting kicked out of college, 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 dedicates himself to making tweets.
When you talk about the crisis we are experiencing now on a cosmic scale and compare it to May 1968, you see the enormous distance traveled and the enormous setback in so many things. I do not make a caricature or a hagiography of the period. There was that search for the truth of each one but socially considered, not only in a private capacity.
At the end of his life, Caballero wants to return to Badalona to make a museum of his work…
…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 author’s brilliance?
I think it’s fantastic. I have no problem with them saying that. They already said it was a display of literary powers, and I accept that, although without exhibitionism, either.
