Spanish author, translator, columnist Javier Marías was also a dear friend of John Ashbery. In speaking about Marías, the author discusses Marías’ love of Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror. Translation compliments of Google Translate.
Javier Marías: his face is writing
September 20, 2022
The Spanish writer Javier Marías in an interview in 2015. PHOTO: JP GANDUL
I still did not want to write about the death of the novelist Javier Maríaswhen it continues to vibrate its way into the shadows. I understand that friends are spurred on by the pain and perplexity of making the obituary. He also urges the need to fire those who could not say goodbye. I have only been a reader and I hardly saw Marías once in Barcelona. Although it is true that the death of someone who admires oneself is always painful, in this case there is a not minor addition, the one I want to suggest, which is linked to a modulation created by the writer himself: that porous and meditative border of his narrators in first person that they took for shared, I will not say the most autobiographical and personal, but a tone of confidence that has probably aroused a particular emotional temperature; that ambiguous belief of the reader who suspects, in reserved exaggeration, that that novel or book was written precisely for him, because otherwise the intense intimacy in which his reading moves cannot be explained. After the Flaubertian distance where the author disappeared from a novel as if he were a god, until making the leap to the expanded proximity of Proust, of Bernhard, even to the immediacy of Borges, who gleans his presence at an angle in what he narrates, or the recovery of Lawrence Sterne, whom Marías translated, everything serves to understand it within a tradition that does not make it relative but rather supports it, because he deepened it. Enter his contemporaries, such as Enrique Vila-Matas, Roberto Bolaño or Antonio Muñoz Molina, authors who have a hook that seems autobiographical but that they themselves are responsible for blurring, turning it into a challenge and turning it around to achieve the unprecedented angle.
There is always more to come —Marías writes—, there always remains, a little more, a minute, the spear, a second, the fever, and another second, the dream —the spear, the fever, my pain and the word, the dream —, and also the endless time that does not even hesitate or slow down after our completion and continues adding and talking, murmuring and inquiring and telling even though we no longer hear and have been silent”.
I wanted to wait, reread some of his books, especially Black back of time , Your face tomorrow and Heart so white , while I reread his essays because they are a pattern of unique generosity to open the cabinet where he worked on his novels; he, who seemed to be a dark and enigmatic author, is clear and even resounding when he talks about writing, about the novel, about criticism, about his favorites. He even wanted to go further afield, to his translations of poetry by Wallace Stevens and, above all, that collection of poems by John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror, which alludes to the painting by Parmigianino, an Italian mannerist from the 16th century. Ashbery plays with the optical distortion of the painter's anamorphism, who portrays himself distorted on a twenty centimeter convex board, and understands that, just like the painting, writing is perspective and distortion, not translation, not copying. Marias reveals the precursor. His detours, digressions and enigmas of his rather turned his life into a secret from which reliefs, horizons and few names can be glimpsed. Only her controversial articles seemed to be an escape valve as a counterpart to the novel, a master class in the difference of register and civic involvement that separated novel and thesis. She feels sorry for those who judge her for what they assume of the articles. The truth is that they complement his work as a novelist. El Pais editorial, where he published his columns, rightly pointed out that Marías "understood the novel as a trade in which the writer's intervention in his society was carried out in a deferred, postponed manner, without jostling."
Who has died is a novelist. What may seem paradoxical is that being a writer of high register, of wide and subtle reflections, without hurry, he has been a publishing success. There is no such paradox. The novel is precisely that bridge between life and high-flying wisdom, which Schlegel already said. His novels do not have arduous, intricate plots, or succession of blows. Marías tells a lot or, better said, gives much more in the texture of his language than in the overlapping of anecdotes.Perhaps the feeling of having read it reminds me of the same feeling left by Henry James, Faulkner or Duras, who have told something, yes, but minimal, or surround it again, besieging it, and thus fly over the tone, the atmosphere, the character, that immediate authority that novelists of talent print on any page and that is not abandoned so as not to miss the air .
Finally, I write about Marías because I was prompted to do so by a painting by another contemporary, Miquel Barceló. I mean leaning bouquet, a painting the height of a room that I found exposed two days ago in the Botero Museum, in Bogotá. Indeed, there is a minimal bouquet, a few twigs that are barely outlined in the midst of a movement of textures and pigments that oscillate between yellow, ocher, blue, soft greens, and a strange diffuse red line. Those masses with relief by Barceló expose a scattered network of gradations, a chromatic explosion, although the inclined branch continues there. One thinks to see sunflowers by the spectrum of yellows, but then even this assumption vanishes. There is no figurative plot that calms the interpretation, that summarizes everything in a gesture, that returns to color a servant of bodies and almost photographic dramas, of a story that imposes itself. To see these textures and colors is to listen to music and figure out a secret story.
As a tribute, a quote, a sample of his relief writing: “There is always more to come —Marías writes—, there always remains, a little more, a minute, the spear, a second, the fever, and another second, the dream — the lance, the fever, my pain and the word, the dream—, and also the endless time that does not even hesitate or slow down after our finish and continues adding and speaking, murmuring and inquiring and telling even though we no longer hear and have been silent ”. The teacher undoes the plot, juggles, goes up, down, jumps, plays and illuminates in his novel Your face tomorrow , and one checks that tomorrow came and his face is writing. (EITHER)
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