Q&A with Andrés Barba, author of A LUMINOUS REPUBLIC
In A Luminous Republic, Andrés Barba’s most recent novel translated into English by Lisa Dillman, a bureaucrat reflects on what was initially the strange arrival of a group of children speaking an unknown language in his city, an incident that escalated until a moment of shocking violence and its consequences threw San Cristóbal into chaos. The following is an exchange between Andrés Barba and Álvaro Enrigue, author of Sudden Death, that was translated into English by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Senior Editor Naomi Gibbs. The original Spanish exchange is available as a PDF (downloadable here).
Álvaro Enrigue: Increasingly in the past few years, it’s seemed to me that every, or almost every narrative device begins with the ending; so many stories and novels are one big elaboration on how a single image unfurls. It’s an image that maybe the author doesn’t fully understand, but one he feels it’s crucial to depict, as if a novel were an investigation of that image. I don’t know if I’m being esoteric and I certainly don’t want to sound like a French professor, but the moment when the reader discovers, at the end of your book, that A Luminous Republic isn’t a concept but a place—a small, beautiful republic of light—in every sense of the word, it’s a dazzling ending. Cormac McCarthy says in The Crossing that “the shape of the road is the road”: the form of the novel is the novel, and the novel is a road to an image, the scaffolding that takes the reader to something, something the reader sees through the gaze of imagination, something that serves as a talisman for the author.
Andrés Barba: I think that all novelists—I’m sure that you’ve had the same experience—we live with this contradiction, where we talk about our novels as if they’re a “closed circuit” when in reality the natural experience of writing a novel is open-ended, ambiguous, disconcerting. In general, as you say, the shape of the road is the road. It begins with a hopefulness that can’t really be justified, a hope that you will get to that image; but so often you don’t, or you do, but the image comes to you in a way that doesn’t work, or it’s there but you don’t even realize it. The most curious thing about this book is that when I was writing it, I thought I was talking about a dystopia and at the end I realized I’d written a utopia. In that way, where someone can ultimately be so wrong about the true nature of something that they’ve spent so many hours with, over the course of so many months, it reminds me a bit of a story by Henry James, about this guy who falls in love with a girl because he thinks she’s a generous person. By the time he realizes how egotistical she is, they’re already married, and not only does he not mind, he almost likes her more. It was a strange moment, but it’s proof that it doesn’t really matter how many books you’ve written, you’re always writing for the first time and we’re always wrong about the most important thing until the final hour. The image that you’re talking about is more surprising than anything else in the book because it surprised the book’s own author when he wrote it.
ÁE: It’s great that you mention James. There’s a subtlety in your novel that reminds me of him: the narrator is a well-educated social worker, a sort of universal character that we don’t often see in literature, but that’s an essential part of the structure of modernity—the erudite bureaucrat. This bureaucrat that’s read so much and has the air of an intellectual, that spends the whole book trying to rationalize things that have no reason, and he doesn’t understand that until the terrible moment when he’s confronted with the tragedy of the Luminous Republic: the pain throughout this irrational state of purity. Your novel, Jamesian, tells the story of a children’s riot, but what becomes the road isn’t that outer story, but the idea that the narrator has of the world, that he has to accept that there are things that can’t be understood, that aren’t any one person’s fault but rather everyone’s responsibility. Lisa Dillman’s translation, of course, is extremely elegant. It does justice to the subtlety of the argument of your book.
AB: Lisa’s translation is particularly impeccable because of her willingness to really let that disconcerting air breathe through the book.
ÁE: But I want to return to your process. It’s true what you say: every book is our first book and the process of writing is always disconcerting. But sometimes I feel like we spend our lives methodically writing one very long book. Or maybe trying out a form that, as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío said, is “the word that escapes,” but you always feel it there, on the tips of your fingers. You’ve written time and again about childhood, about the fragility of innocence and the myths that we’ve constructed around it because we can’t bear to break it, about the possibility of a language that represents things with the same intensity they possessed for us when were kids. A Luminous Republic probes once more these same concerns that return again and again in your work. And it makes me wonder if the true luminous republic, this utopia that your spoke about in your response, is the language of childhood.
AB: It’s true that we return to the same themes time and again. Almost all of the authors who interest me are of the “one very long book” variety, as you say. As a reader and I suppose even with the people who I like, generally, I hope, almost fanatically, that they’ll be the same forever and ever, ceaselessly and tirelessly; it happens to me with Lispector, with Tsvietaieva, with Natalia Ginzburg, with Bernhard, with James, with De Quincey, with so many. I think I like their flaws as if they were virtues because they’re flaws that “only I” understand. And nevertheless, when I think of myself as an author, it’s entirely the opposite, I think that I have the obligation not to repeat myself; when I think about my writing repetition seems like the “professionalization” of literature, that it’s the most dangerous trap to fall into. To be a “professional writer” should be an oxymoron, but for a lot of people, it’s far from it. I think that I have the obligation to boycott any pragmatic ideas that I have about turning myself into a professional writer. I see two ways of doing that: looking for themes and styles that can’t be controlled, that can easily go wrong, and always choosing, out of all of the options, the least “salable.”
But to your point, I can’t resist returning to childhood again and again. It’s true. It could be the language, as you say, I don’t know. It seems likelier to me that what interests me about childhood is that it’s pre-verbal, and pre-civilization too. Lewis Carroll said that after six years old, kids stopped being of interest to him. I think that the same thing happens to me, I want to say, in the literary sense. On the other hand, I was never a “literate” child. I hated reading until I was a teenager. I didn’t start to read until I was sixteen or seventeen, very late. Before that reading was something that stood in the way of me and life. And I’m glad I came to literature alone, though of course that’s nonsense, everyone comes to literature alone. But I’m glad I came to it because I wanted to, because it gave me pleasure.
ÁE: A Luminous Republic isn’t just a Latin American novel, it’s a very Latin American novel. Your journey is unusual: it’s much more common for novels to be written by Latin Americans but set in Europe than for novels to be written by Europeans but set in Latin America. It’s not the journey of Henry James but of Joseph Conrad—in Nostromo. (I think you’ve translated both of them to Spanish, right?) I suppose there are hundreds of books of Europeans looking at Latin America, but their gaze is usually so condescending and lascivious. In your novel an American talks about America and that’s that, no matter where the author comes from. That makes you a Spaniard colonized by Latin America—which, along with being a fun thing, and pretty punk, seems entirely reasonable to me.
AB: Ah, the million-dollar question. I don’t even know where to start. I can see you smiling while writing that question.
In the first place, the allusions to Conrad and James are spot-on. In terms of the Anglo-Saxon world it would also make sense to mention the way in which Kipling invented (and sold to the whole world) a version of India that only existed in his mind, a place he’d only lived until he was thirteen, or the way that Pearl S. Buck invented a China would be desirable to gringos.
And I like this term that you’ve invented and that I’m going to adopt going forward. I feel colonized by Latin America, for a lot of reasons, some obvious and biographical and others that are of essential literary import: Spanish-language literature in the twenty-first century has to be Latin American. Spain is an old cow. On top of that I’ve never felt much love for Spain. It’s always felt like a boorish country with an inferiority complex to me, full of blowhards. The quintessential Spanish literary figure is the fake cowboy, whether he’s friendly, like Don Quixote, or odious, like the characters in Valle-Inclán’s sonatas. The aristocracy without money. Or the money without elegance.
I resent Spain, I know I do, and I avoid the Spanish as I would the plague, above all by going abroad. At the same time I’m unavoidably Spanish in many ways and those will catch up with me just like the Germans caught the Russian Spies in WWII because they swore in Russian when they were giving birth.
I should add, for a bit of balance, that I hate the hang-ups some Latin American writers have about Spain, the self-conscious way they make fun of it. Like a teenager who has his first beer and immediately lays into his dad.
Really, though, it feels a little absurd to me to talk about Latin America in such general terms anyway, because in reality a man from Chile and a man from Cuba are as similar as a man from China and a man from France.
That being said, A Luminous Republic is a Latin American novel, without a doubt, in the sense that I would never have been able to write it if I’d never left Madrid. But also, you’ve seen that it’s not set in any concrete place in Latin America (it could be several different places), the narrator speaks in the Spanish of Spain, it’s all a strange hybrid that works because the book has the format of a fable. I didn’t want for any country in Latin America to accuse this little Spanish man of cultural appropriation. But this landscape is already mine in many ways, I love it and it’s mysterious to me and I miss it when I’m away. I’ve spent many years living there, and this September I’m going to move to Argentina for good. I’m sure I’ll apply for citizenship as well, to which I have the right, and I’ll do it for entirely sentimental reasons, so that the mistake will be over and I won’t be where I’m from anymore, which seems like the best thing in the world to me.
ÁE: Oof, Andrés, I could talk and argue about that answer, and piss myself laughing with you, forever. I could go through sentence by sentence asking for clarifications and throwing tantrums. And it’s making me think all over again what a shame it is that this shutdown from coronavirus kept us from having this conversation in person in New York. I agree with you that the Spanish-language literature of the twenty-first century will be Latin American, but not because Spain is an old cow—self-criticism as oblique confirmation of ancestry, a Spanish specialty—but for a statistical issue that stems from a monumental historic anomaly: hundreds of millions of people speak the same regional European language because Isabella of Castile—dazzling and wild as she was—said “Sure, let’s go” to Christopher Columbus’s project—which was crazy, but also made sense.
And that’s why I disagree with what you’re saying—maybe a comment with roots more Argentine than Spanish—about a Chilean person and a Cuban person being as similar as a Chinese person and a French person. I remember a line from a song by an Uruguayan rock band that unfortunately I can’t remember the name of: “I look more like a Swede / than a native Guatemalan.” It’s not true: Chileans and Cubans speak the same language. Latin Americans share the same Catholic mantel, dappled by Jewish and Asian immigrants, and the genetic and cultural foundation—present in every American culture—of the forced migration of Africans. We share the North African music tradition of melisma and plucking—which came to us from Andalusia—and we all understand, because it’s how we were taught in school, that our shared indigenous past—Taíno, Mapuche, Aztec, or Inca—is a classic past with its own rules. Cuba and Chile were part of an empire for more time than they’ve been independent nations. Ultimately, just to provoke you, because I love how passionate you were about the last question, I’d say that a Spaniard and a Paraguayan have more in common than a Spaniard and a Frenchman. I’d say that for a long time Spain has been Latin America’s foot in Europe and that the originality and brilliance of your work as a writer comes, in large part, from the elegant resignation with which you’ve incorporated the immensity of America into this language we both exploit and adore.
AB: Ah, it’s so different to talk about these things in person…You can see immediately how close we really are. But a virus has split us in two. I also miss being able to have this conversation in flesh and blood.
We agree, in part. I suppose that when you say that a Spaniard and a Paraguayan have more in common than a Spaniard and a Frenchman you’re thinking of a Spaniard from Madrid (the problem of centralism) or of a Spaniard from Seville (the problem of Costumbrism), the two mistakes we make when we make generalizations based off of anything, because the truth is that a Catalan or a Basque has more in common with a Frenchman than a Paraguayan, a people who I adore and whose landscape shares a lot with A Luminous Republic.
Because another take on this conversation would be for me to say that it doesn’t have anything to do with indigenous pasts, or Isabellas, that it’s all much closer to home, based on the ways we legitimize through literature—and we would both agree that fortunately things have changed a lot and a Latin American author doesn’t have to pay a toll to a Spanish publisher to be translated into thirty languages.
It’s all pretty tiring, no matter what, because the conversation doesn’t go anywhere, above all because it doesn’t bring us together the way reading can. I’m going to go back to the question of literary colonization, to what you said, that I’ve been colonized by Latin America; I love that because it’s very true, but also something I need you to say about me. You say that A Luminous Republic is a very Latin American novel, but I don’t really get why. Is it just because of the landscape? Would you think it was very Latin American if it took place in a city? I think, for example, of Carpentier, one of my author obsessions, Cuban, as you well know. And I see that Reasons of State is a Latin American novel that takes place in Paris, while The Rite of Spring is a French novel set in Cuba, the two written by the same author, and I imagine that it didn’t occur to him at any moment that he was going to assume another perspective, because there’s a moment when identity ruptures—or when you throw the beret, if you’d prefer a more Spanish simile.
It reminds me of something Sartre said, which is so interesting and so liberating: “I choose my past.” It’s the same as saying, yeah, those guys gave birth to me, but I choose my parents. For me, this novel is the daughter of my translations of the complete works of Conrad, but also, equally, of a group of authors who are so present in my life, who changed everything with their freedom. I’m thinking, for example, of Felisberto Hernández (who in Spain, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist), whose work I devoured not just as good literature, but also as a missing piece of the puzzle; or there’s Watanabe, a poet who I consider as good as the best of Latin America’s, who builds his literature outside of South American traditions. Borges, the quintessential Argentine, is an English author. And we could go on. But go ahead, let’s continue with this—what seems so Latin American to you about Luminous Republic?
ÁE: It’s not a question of landscape or language, though you’re right that the landscape and the language are a big part of it: there’s jungle, they’re Hispanic, it’s Latin America, period. But we’re not talking about the location of the story, or not only that, or not that fundamentally. It’s also not a matter of diction: it’s your book and it would be ridiculous for you to try to put on turns of phrase that aren’t the ones you write with and have always written with. It seems to me that it’s a matter of inspiration: your Luminous Republic made me think of the Carpentier of The Lost Steps, as well as a foundational book for all of us that, thanks to the great Esther Allen, now can be read by our colleagues from the United States: Zama by Antonio de Benedetto. It’s the geography, the strain, the river, but it’s also something more: it’s the thing that can be said, that the heat doesn’t reveal, that can’t be understood but becomes a definitive part of existence, the thing that gets lost in the jungle. I didn’t think of the great Filisberto Hernández reading your novel—will he be translated into English?—but it seems to me that there’s something of Juan José Saer in the density of the narrator’s voice, a withdrawal from worldly things that maybe comes from the divine Juan Carlos Onetti. You don’t tell us what happens, but how it’s perceived by someone. The Latin American indirectness—so useful for writing, so frustrating in everyday life. All these inspirations, the ones I thought of as I read your work, they’re not just Latin American, they’re fighting to the death with Spanish realism. And there’s another thing: we’re cousins or not, we’re close but we’re not close, cultural hegemonies or capitalist ones, blah blah blah.
AB: I particularly like those last two Argentine reference points, especially since you’ve gotten right to the heart of it there, especially with Saer, another misplaced author, an Argentine who wrote from France, and a novel, El entenado, in which the protagonist is once again a Spaniard in Paraná—doubly misplaced then—the same as in Di Benedetto’s Zama, which is really a metaphysical novel that has something of the free verse of its literary moment on the continent, more like a sister to Buzatti’s The Tartar Steppe. And so we’re back to that question of belonging and inspiration again, which is to say, where it’s from or where it chooses to be from, something we give more importance to than is really called for.
It’s a good time to think about whether or not we’re boring everyone, probably a little, but it’s ok, what this conversation has made clear, the important thing and I’m afraid also the unfinished thing and maybe even a thing of beauty, is that you and I needed to use A Luminous Republic as a pretext to talk about all of these other things. I don’t think it’s that common for a Latin American writer and a Spanish writer to talk in the way we have. We should celebrate that.
ÁE: While I cleaned up the kitchen I was listening to “Young Artists Showcase” on WQXR, one of the few contemporary music shows that’s still on New York radio. The show was dedicated to Alicia De Larrocha—a Catalan composer—and a young Valencian pianist who plays her work: Jorge Tabarés. At the beginning of the conversation, the interviewer asks the pianist if he feels an affinity, a closeness, with De Larrocha. He responds: “Well, I’m Valencian: there are 400 kilometers between Valencia and Barcelona.” I can imagine the interviewer thinking in American dimensions and raising his eyebrows at that. That’s what our readers must be doing—if we have any left.
But let me bring us back to an American topic before we leave off: you ran back to Europe as the siege of the Coronavirus was closing in on us. You’d been here at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, researching a book that’s set in New York. I think you can talk about it, without provoking any venerable Hispanic superstitions, but it seems to me that the last time we saw one another you told me that you’d finished it…
AB: In terms of distance, you know very well that 400 kilometers can be nothing or everything. It is nothing, in Argentina, or the US, or Mexico, but in Spain it’s what separates a Galician from a Basque, and a Basque from a Catalan, which is to say, three distinct languages, and you could even say it’s three distinct nations of people that, as you know, don’t look much alike. Sometimes people forget that Spain is such a monster when it comes to identity, so hard to digest, even for the Spanish.
The new novel that I’m finishing now and that I was writing at the Cullman Center, is another a novel about identity and belonging, about a Spanish architect, Rafael Guastavino, who arrived in New York at the end of the nineteenth century and patented a medieval construction system that he used to build, among many other buildings, Grand Central Station, St. John the Divine, the Stock Market, and the Queensboro Bridge. Which is to say, he was a fraud, and an opportunist, but also one of the architects whose work has most shaped the modern character of this city, work that’s preserve in this city’s architecture as a sort of personal brand. The book is also a rhetorical construction about the impossibility of writing a biography of Guastavino or anyone else, owing a lot to Borges, but also to Sterne.
And so to end, Álvaro, thank you so much for your interest in the book and also for this conversation. What a shame we couldn’t have had it in person.
