In the Spanish cultural press, it sometimes seems that columnists take turns to see who can come up with the most extravagant statement of the week. And in recent days, two articles have coincided to paint a small picture of unintentional humour about the literary profession. One informs us that almost no one is a writer, and the other tries to convince us that anyone can publish a novel. Together they form a perfect sketch of contemporary absurdity.
The first episode is signed by Alberto Olmos, who has decided that only those individuals who live exclusively from the books they publish deserve to be called writers. If you earn your living in another way — a steady job, freelance work, selling lemonade on the street — and you also write, then you are not a writer but, at best, an amateur with a keyboard. According to this yardstick, literature would be reduced to such an exclusive club that it would make yacht owners in Monaco cry with envy.
Of course, the theory has its charm: it forces us to imagine a Parnassus made up of a handful of publishing survivors. There we would find J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, Danielle Steele and Corín Tellado, selling like hotcakes and therefore with solid credentials; Mario Vargas Llosa, Arturo Pérez Reverte and Stephen King, if we accept that the dollar also counts; and little else. Perhaps some Nordic thriller writers. Perhaps a best-selling novelist. But certainly not poets, those beings who publish editions of two hundred copies and who generally huddle around literature just as others huddle around a fireplace: to keep from freezing to death, not to pay the rent.
If we applied Olmos’ criteria retrospectively, the history of literature would be a celluloid film cut with scissors. Bukowski, for example, would never be a writer: he was a postman, a postal worker, a survivor of hostile schedules. At best, he would be a ‘postman with narrative tendencies.’ Hemingway, with his life as a correspondent, adventurer, fisherman, and amateur boxer, would be a ‘risk professional with a notebook.’ Faulkner, who was a pilot and worked in a university power plant, would be recorded as a ‘boiler operator’ with a regionalist hobby.
The list grows: Kafka, insurance clerk; T.S. Eliot, banker with metrical aspirations; Pessoa, office worker with poorly paid heteronyms; Italo Svevo, anti-corrosive entrepreneur; Wallace Stevens, executive and insurance lawyer; García Márquez, full-time journalist; Rulfo, tyre salesman; Cortázar, translator and UNESCO official; Bolaño, night watchman; Chekhov, medical professional (i.e., clearly suspected of not being a writer). And we could add Virginia Woolf as a craft editor, Gogol as a moral accountant, and Beckett as a mystic of silence, if we accept that metaphors also pay the bills.
All of them, according to the recent argument, would not be writers but people with ambitious hobbies: citizens who —as a public warning— should stop deceiving themselves and return to their jobs.
Meanwhile, the second article of the day arrives, published in La Vanguardia, which aims to explain how to publish a novel with the enthusiasm of a self-help manual. There we are told that all we need to do is plan, discipline ourselves, breathe, be grateful, visualise and believe in ourselves. It won’t be long before he recommends listening to binaural frequencies while the manuscript corrects itself by decree of the universe. If the piece is read with irony, it works. If it is read seriously, it works even better — as unintentional comedy.
The author is David Uclés, who in his column behaves like a character worthy of a novel, although in reality he seems to be a master in the art of detecting literary scholarships. Not just any scholarships, but those that seem destined for a select few: well-connected writers, editorially blessed or with certified cultural lineage. Uclés functions as a diviner of the Official Gazette: where others see bureaucratic pages, he detects opportunities that glow under ultraviolet light. The problem is that, in order to activate some of them, one must be — according to Olmos — exactly what almost no one is: a professional writer.
Combined, the two texts paint a paradoxical ecosystem: anyone can publish, but almost no one can call themselves a writer. Publishing is an accessible adventure; being a writer, on the other hand, is an economic rarity. The result is an impossible map: a world full of books written by authors who, technically, do not exist.
In short:
— If you have a steady job, you are not a writer.
— If you write for pleasure, you are not a writer either.
— If you publish but do not make a living from it, even less so.
— If you publish and make a living from it, be careful: you could end up looking too much like Corín Tellado.
— And if you aspire to a scholarship, you’d better get advice from Uclés, because the map is esoteric.
So yes: literature, which was always difficult, is now downright impossible. And perhaps that is where its strange charm lies: in that elegant absurdity that allows us to continue writing — and publishing — without permission, even if the column of the day insists on reminding us that, officially, we are not writers.
