When Enrique Vila-Matas trolled 19th century realism
After convincing us in Bartleby & Co. that not writing too is writing in many ways, and in some cases better than writing, Enrique Vila-Matas’ next in his trilogy Metaliteraria on the Pathologies of Writing, Montano’s Malady, brings us into the life of a literature-obsessed literary critic who is never certain of fiction and reality. In the middle of Vila-Matas’ typical maze of writers, literary fears, postmodern anxiety, and an unreliable narrator, there is a literary map that our protagonist has taken up drawing. It is “a highly complex map where we find a wide variety of provinces, warrens, nations, bends, woods, islands, shady corners, cities”, but the most interesting detail we found lies at its outskirts, in:
“…a slum called Spain, where a kind of traditional, nineteenth-century Realism is encouraged and where it is normal for a majority of critics and readers to despise thought. A pearl of a slum. And as if this were not enough, this slum is connected by an underwater tunnel — which cannot even appear on the map — with a particular territory that recalls the island of Realism discovered by Chesterton, an island whose inhabitants passionately applaud everything they consider to be real art and cry, ‘this is Realism! This is things as they really are!’ The Spanish are among those who think that, if you repeat something often enough, it will end up being true.”