Dublinesque
Enrique Vila-Matas
In this novel, Enrique Vila-Matas traces a journey connecting the worlds of Joyce and Beckett, and all they symbolize.
One night, a renowned and now retired literary publisher has a vivid dream that takes place in Dublin, a city he’s never visited. The central scene of the dream is a funeral in the era of Ulysses. The publisher would give anything to know if an unidentified character in his dream is the great author he always wanted to meet, or the ghostly angel who abandoned him during childhood. As the days go by, he will come to understand that his vision of the end of an era was prophetic.
Enrique Vila-Matas traces a journey that connects the worlds of Joyce and Beckett, revealing the difficulties faced by literary authors, publishers, and good readers in a society where literature is losing influence. A robust work, Dublinesque is a masterwork of irony, humor, and erudition by one of Spain’s most celebrated living authors.
Enrique Vila-Matas
Dublinesque
For Paula de Parma
May
He belongs to an increasingly rare breed of sophisticated, literary publishers. And every day, since the beginning of this century, he has watched in despair the spectacle of the noble branch of his trade — publishers who still read and who have always been drawn to literature — gradually, surreptitiously dying out. He had financial trouble two years ago, but managed to shut the publishing house down without having to declare bankruptcy, toward which it had been heading with terrifying obstinacy, despite its prestige. In over thirty years as an independent he has seen it all, successes but also huge failures. He attributes the loss of direction in the end to his resistance to publishing the gothic vampire tales and other nonsense now in fashion, and so forgets part of the truth: he was never renowned for good financial management, and what’s more, his exaggerated fanaticism for literature was probably harmful.
Samuel Riba — known to everyone as Riba — has published many of the great writers of his time. In some cases only one book, but enough so they appear in his catalog. Sometimes, although aware that in the honorable sector of his trade there are still some valiant Quixotes, he likes to see himself as the last publisher. He has a somewhat romantic image of himself, and spends his life feeling that it’s the end of an era, the end of the world, doubtless influenced by the sudden cessation of his activities. He has a remarkable tendency to read his life as a literary text, interpreting it with the distortions befitting the compulsive reader he’s been for so many years. Aside from this, he is hoping to sell his assets to a foreign publishing house, but talks have been stalled for some time. He lives in an anxious state of powerful, end-of-everything psychosis. Nothing, and no one, has yet convinced him that getting old has its good points. Does it?
He is visiting his elderly parents, and at this moment, looking them up and down with open curiosity. He has come to tell them how his recent trip to Lyon went. Apart from every Wednesday — a regular engagement — it’s a long-standing custom of his to go and see them whenever he gets back from a trip. In the last two years, he hasn’t received even a tenth of the offers to travel that he used to, but he’s hidden this detail from his parents, as well as the fact that he has closed down the publishing house, since he considers them to be too old for such upsets, and anyway, he’s not sure they would really take it in.
He cheers up every time he gets invited somewhere, because, among other things, it allows him to keep up the fiction of his busyness for his parents. Despite the fact that he will soon turn sixty he is, as can be seen, highly dependent on them, perhaps because he has no children, and they, in turn, have only him: an only child. He’s even traveled to places that barely interest him, just to be able to tell his parents about the trip afterward and keep them believing — they don’t read newspapers or watch television — that he is still publishing and his presence is still sought in many places, and therefore, that things are still going very well for him. But it’s not remotely like this. When he was a publisher he used to have a very busy social life, but now he has far less of one, if it counts as a social life at all. On top of the loss of so many false friendships, there is also the problem of the anxiety that has overcome him since he gave up drinking two years ago. It is an anxiety that comes as much from his awareness that, without alcohol, he would have been less daring in what he published, as from his certainty that his social life was forced, not at all natural and perhaps came only from an unhealthy fear of disorder and solitude.
Nothing has gone well for him since he began courting solitude. Despite trying to keep it from falling into the abyss, his marriage is in fact teetering on the edge, although not always, because his relationship passes through the most varied states and goes from euphoria and love to hatred and disaster. Every day he feels more unstable in every way, and he’s become grumpy and dislikes most of what he sees. Something to do with getting old, probably. But the fact is that he is starting to feel uncomfortable in the world, and turning sixty makes him feel as if he has a noose around his neck.
His elderly parents always listen to the tales of his travels with great curiosity and attention. At times, they even look like two exact replicas of Kubla Khan listening to Marco Polo’s stories. The visits that follow one of his trips take on a special quality; they seem to belong to a higher category than the more monotonous, habitual Wednesday visits. Today’s also has that quality of being extraordinary. However, something strange is happening because, despite having been in the house for a while, he still hasn’t managed to broach the subject of Lyon. And the thing is he cannot tell his parents anything about his time in that city, because he was so cut off from the world there and his journey so savagely cerebral that he is unable to dredge up a single, minimally human anecdote. Besides, what actually happened to him in Lyon was unpleasant. It was a cold, unfriendly trip, like those hypnotic journeys that lately he so often undertakes in front of his computer.
“So you’ve been to Lyon,” his mother says again, by now even slightly concerned.
His father has slowly begun to light his pipe and looks at him in surprise, as if also wondering why he doesn’t tell them anything about Lyon. But what can he tell them? He’s not going to start talking about the general theory of the novel he managed to concoct all by himself, there in the hotel. They wouldn’t be at all interested in how he elaborated this theory, and moreover, he doesn’t think they really know what a “literary theory” might be. And supposing they did know, he’s sure they would find the subject profoundly boring. They might even come to the same conclusion as Celia: that he has been too isolated recently, too disconnected from the real world and seduced by his computer or, in its absence — as in Lyon — by his own mental journeys.
In Lyon he spent his time avoiding all contact with Villa Fondebrider, the organization that had invited him to give a lecture on the grave state of literary publishing in Europe. In revenge, perhaps, for the disdain shown him by the organizers in not sending anyone to meet him either at the airport or the hotel, Riba had shut himself up in his hotel room and managed to realize one of the dreams he’d had when he was in publishing and didn’t have time for anything: to write a general theory of the novel.
He’d published lots of important authors, but only in Julien Gracq’s novel The Opposing Shore did he perceive any spirit of the future. In his room in Lyon, over the course of endless hours spent locked away, he devoted himself to a theory of the novel that, based on the lessons apparent to him the moment he opened The Opposing Shore, established five elements he considered essential for the novel of the future. These essential elements were: intertextuality; connection with serious poetry; awareness of a moral landscape in ruins; a slight favoring of style over plot; a view of writin
g that moves forward like time.
It was a daring theory, given that it put forward Gracq’s book, usually considered antiquated, as the most advanced of all novels. He filled a great many pages expanding on his proposal for the novel of the future. But when he had finished this tough job, he remembered the “sacred instinct of having no theories” spoken of by Pessoa, another of his favorite writers and whose book The Education of the Stoic he had once had the honor of publishing. He remembered this instinct and thought of how foolish novelists sometimes were, and remembered several Spanish writers he had published whose novels were the ingenuous product of extensive, sophisticated theories. What a huge waste of time, Riba thought, to come up with a theory in order to write a novel. He now had genuine grounds to say this, as he had just written one himself.
Let’s see, thought Riba. If one has the theory, why write the novel? And at the same time as he asked himself this, and doubtless in order to avoid the strong sense of having wasted his time, of wasting it even as he asked the question, he understood that the hours spent in his hotel room writing his theory of the novel had basically allowed him to get rid of it. Wasn’t this contemptible? No, of course not. His theory would still be what it was, lucid and daring, but he was going to destroy it by throwing it into the wastebasket in his room.
He held a secret, private funeral for his theory and for all the theories that had ever existed, and then left the city of Lyon without once having contacted the people who had invited him to speak about the grave — or maybe not so grave, thought Riba throughout the journey — state of literary publishing in Europe. He slipped quietly out of the hotel and took a train back to Barcelona, twenty-four hours after arriving in Lyon. He didn’t even leave a note for the people at Villa Fondebrider justifying his invisibility in Lyon, or his subsequent strange flight. He understood that the whole journey had served only to set out his theory and then hold a private funeral for it. He left totally convinced that his entire theory of what the novel should be was nothing more than a document drawn up with the single aim of liberating himself from its contents. Or, rather, a document with the exclusive aim of confirming that the best thing to do is to travel and to lose theories, lose them all.
“So you’ve been to Lyon,” his mother says, returning to the attack.
It has been a May of changeable weather, amazingly rainy for Barcelona. Today is cold, gray, and sad. For a few minutes, he imagines he’s in New York, in a building where you can hear the traffic driving toward the Holland Tunnel: rivers of cars heading home after work. It’s pure imagination. He has never heard the sound of the Holland Tunnel. He soon returns to reality, to Barcelona and the depressing ash-gray light. Celia, his wife, expects him home around six. Everything is happening with a certain degree of normality, apart from his parents’ growing concern as they realize their son is telling them nothing about Lyon.
But what can he tell them about what happened there? What can he say? That, as they well know, he hasn’t had a drink for two years, since his long-suffering kidneys put him in the hospital, and that this has confined him to a permanent state of sobriety, which means that sometimes he dedicates himself to activities as outlandish as elaborating literary theories and never leaving his hotel room, not even to meet the people who invited him? That in Lyon he didn’t speak to anyone and that, in short, since he stopped publishing, this is what he does every day in the long hours he spends sitting in front of his computer in Barcelona? That what he finds most regrettable and what saddens him most is that he left publishing without having discovered an unknown writer who turned out to be a genius? That he is still traumatized by the misfortune inherent in his former trade, that most bitter misfortune of having to look for authors, those tiresomely essential beings, since without them the whole business would be impossible? That in the past few weeks he has had pains in his right knee, almost certainly caused by uric acid or arthritis, supposing these are two different things? That he was once talkative thanks to alcohol and now he has become melancholy, which was probably always his true natural state? What can he tell his parents? That everything comes to an end?
His visit is going by with a degree of monotony and his parents even resort to recalling, due in part to the tedium dominating this encounter, the now distant day in 1959 when General Eisenhower deigned to visit Spain and ended the international isolation of Franco’s dictatorship. His father spent that day bursting with enthusiasm, not because of the diplomatic battle won by the wretched Galician general, but rather because the United States, the vanquishers of Nazism, had at last approached a moribund Spain. It is one of the first significant memories of Riba’s life. He remembers, above all, the moment his mother asked his father why he was so “excessively enthusiastic” about the American president’s visit.
“What does enthusiastic mean?” Riba had asked his parents.
He will always remember exactly how he framed this question, because — timid as he was at that age — it was the first one he asked. The second question he remembers asking, although he’s not so sure how he framed it. He knows, in any case, that it had to do with his name — Samuel — and with what some teachers and children at school had said to him. His father explained that he was only Jewish on his mother’s side and since she had converted to Catholicism a few months after he was born, he should relax — that’s what he said, relax — and just consider himself the son of Catholics.
Today his father, as on previous occasions when they’ve spoken of Eisenhower’s visit, denies he was so excited, and says it’s a misunderstanding of his mother’s, who thought that he got far too worked up about the American president’s visit. He also denies that for a while his favorite film was Charles Walters’s High Society with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra. They watched it at least three times, at the end of the fifties, and Riba remembers this film always used to put his father in an excellent mood. He was crazy about everything that came from the United States; the films and the glamour fascinated him; he was drawn to the lives led by human beings who were like them but in a place that seemed as remote as it was inaccessible. And it’s very likely Riba inherited from him, from his father, his fascination with the New World, the distant charm of those places that, back then, seemed so unattainable, maybe because the people who lived there seemed like the happiest people on earth.
They talk about Eisenhower’s visit and High Society and the D-Day landings, but his father continues stubbornly to deny he felt such enthusiasm. Just when it seems as if, to avoid getting stuck on the subject, his parents will soon return to the Lyon question, night falls on Barcelona with unusual speed; it grows dark very quickly, and a violent downpour arrives with a big flash of lightning. It falls just at the moment he is getting ready to leave the house.
The dreadful crash of a solitary clap of thunder. The rain falls on Barcelona with a rage and force never before seen. Suddenly he has the feeling of being trapped and at the same time of being perfectly capable of walking through walls. Somewhere, at the edge of one of his thoughts, he discovers a darkness that chills him to the bone. He isn’t too surprised, he’s used to this happening to him in his parents’ apartment. The most likely explanation is that, a few moments ago, one of the numerous damp ghosts — peaceful ghosts of some ancestor or other who inhabit this dark mezzanine — has slipped inside him.
He wants to forget about the domestic specter chilling him to the bone, so he goes over to the window and there he sees a young man who, with no umbrella in the rain, standing right in the middle of Calle Aribau, seems to be spying on the house. He is perhaps a superior ghost. But in any case, the young man is without a doubt a phantom from outside, not one of the family. Riba exchanges a few glances with him. The young man has an Indian-looking face, and wears an electric-blue Nehru jacket with gold buttons down the front. What can he be doing out there and why is he dressed like that? When the strange young man sees that the traffic lights have changed and the cars are starting to move along the street again,
he crosses to the other side. Is it really a Nehru jacket he’s wearing? It could just be some kind of fashionable jacket, but it’s not at all clear. Only someone like Riba, who has always been such an attentive reader of newspapers and is now of a respectable age, would remember people such as Srî Pandit Jawâharlâl Nehru, a politician from another age, the Indian leader who was spoken of so much forty years ago, and now not at all.
Suddenly his father turns around in his armchair, and in a gloomy tone of voice, as if consumed by a feverish melancholy, says he’d like someone to explain something to him. And he repeats it twice, very anxiously. Riba’s never seen him in such a dismal mood: he’d like someone to explain something to him.
“What, Dad?”
Riba thinks he’s referring to the great peals of thunder, and patiently starts to explain the origin and cause of certain types of storms. But he soon realizes what he’s saying sounds ridiculous, and moreover, his father is looking at him as if he’s stupid. He pauses tragically and the pause becomes eternal, he can’t carry on talking. Perhaps now he might resolve to tell them something about Lyon. As things stand, it might even be an opportune moment to distract them by describing the literary theory he put together there. He could say he wrote the theory on a cigarette paper and then smoked it. Yes, he should tell them things like that. Or instead, to stir things up even more, ask them that question he hasn’t asked for years now: “Why did Mom convert to Catholicism? I need an explanation.”
He knows it’s useless, that they’ll never answer this.
He could also tell them about Julien Gracq and about the day he visited him and went out with the writer onto the balcony of his house in Sion, and Gracq contemplated bolts of lightning, and with particular attention, what he called the unleashing of erroneous energy.
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