Nothing indicates the health of a cultural tradition more clearly than its willingness to burn books. When a community decides that the best way to refute an idea is to set it on fire—preferably on a holiday and with merchandising—one can breathe easy: civilization is still moving forward, even if backward.
The recent episode surrounding Eduardo Mendoza—guilty of having suggested that Sant Jordi might be, beware, illiterate—has restored literary criticism to its physical, thermal, even pyrotechnic dimension. Certain nationalist sectors, irritated by the irreverence—how dare anyone joke about a saint, a dragon, and a chain of bookstores?—have responded with a proposal that far surpasses any academic review: the direct combustion of the book-object.
There is something endearing about the gesture. It reminds us that, deep down, every community needs its calendar of saints, and that what is truly offensive is not so much heresy as the joke. Because, as we have seen these days, identity—that robust, millenary, indestructible thing—can wobble dangerously before a witty sentence about a knight who kills dragons and, apparently, did not read much either.
There is, moreover, a poetic justice in all this. For years, Mendoza has accumulated prizes with the discretion of someone who suspects that no one is reading them. Now, at last, he has found his audience: not readers, but arsonists. It is progress. At least someone has opened his books, even if only to check whether they burn well. The dream of every writer—to be read with passion—is fulfilled here in a slightly more caloric variant.
What is most fascinating is the involuntary return to a primitive form of literary canon: canon by cremation. Cultural supplements and suspect juries are no longer necessary. A bonfire and a little patriotic fervor will suffice. If the book survives, it is a classic; if it burns quickly, it was weak. A clean, direct, and above all highly participatory methodology.
It is worth keeping in mind, however, the theological nuance of the matter. Sant Jordi is not only a saint: he is a symbolic franchise that combines blood, roses, and sales. To touch that balance is to risk the dragon—that famously tolerant mythological creature—reappearing in the form of an organizing committee. And we all know that organizing committees are far more dangerous than dragons.
In short, the episode leaves us with a comforting lesson: literature still matters. Perhaps not to be read, but certainly to be feared. And in times when books barely compete with screens, discovering that they can still provoke desires for bonfires has something of a triumph about it. Not exactly the triumph one expected, but a triumph, after all.
