A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
Oficial de Cinematografía.
Though not a big fan of literary or intellectual groups, he ended up a member in the Círculo Lingüístico de Madrid along with Agustín García Calvo, Isabel Llácer, Carlos Piera, and Víctor Sánchez de Zavala, and he’s considered one of the children of the war that ended up forming part of the generation of the middle of the century. In addition, along with Ignacio Aldecoa, Jesús Fernández Santos, Carmen Martín Gaite (to whom he would be married until 1970), and Alfonso Sastre, he participated in the creation and direction of Revista Española, which was as much a platform for that generation of writers, poets, and playwrights as it was a mouthpiece for up-and-coming Western literature: the still emerging work of Capote, of Zavattini (expertly translated by Sánchez Ferlosio1), or the first experiments of the Nouveau Roman de l’école du Regard.
Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio became known in 1951 with Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhuí, a bildungsroman on horses, somewhere between a picaresque novel and magic realism, but true recognition come to him in 1955 for El Jarama (which would win him the Premio Nadal that same year and the Premio de la Critica the next one). Years later, he himself summarized that time: “first I made an incursion into ‘prose,’ or ‘la bella pagina’ (Alfanhuí); then I wanted to have some fun with speech (El Jarama), and finally, after many years of grammar, I discovered the language.”
Of course, after his incursion into the world of fiction writing, he rejected “the grotesque imposture of the literati,” and dedicated the years that followed to the study of grammar. Seized by this passion, Sánchez Ferlosio would spend those years in a “graphomaniacal furor” in absolute silence in terms of publishing. As he once said, “I don’t write with the immediate need to publish. I always say that I know how to knit, but I don’t know how to make a sweater.”
For reasons of mental health (grammar is tremendously obsessive), he returned to the publishing world (that doesn’t publish) in 1974 with Las semanas del jardín (a title inspired by the novel that Cervantes never managed to write). The years that followed, he dedicated to his work as an essayist and in 1986 he returned to writing fiction with El testimonio de Yarfoz.
The largest part of his most recent work has centered around essays with titles like Vendrán más años malos y nos harán más ciegos, a collection of reflections and aphorisms that won him Premio Nacional de Ensayo and Premio Ciudad de Barcelona. Like a dyed-in-the-wool bellicose intellectual, he has freely proclaimed a total lack of influence from contemporary literature, similarly his complete repudiation of television, sports, and publicity. His darts have struck such figures as Ortega y Gasset, Julián Marías, Karl Popper, and García Lorca.
His agent, Carmen Balcells, once said of him that he has written two or three hundred times as many pages as he has published. Though the number is, perhaps, exaggerated, there is no doubt that Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio is an author as irrepressible as he is indispensable. With your permission . . .
1 The little novel, which it would be inappropriate to call “neorealist,” Totó il buono de Cesare Zavattini was the story from where Vittorio De Sica got the screenplay for Miracolo a Milano.
THE ACORN
THE TORTURE OF DOCTOR JOHNSON
For many years I did no literary work, so I would have preferred to submit an essay or a fragment of an essay, but it would have been too long. So I selected a few paragraphs from my most recent novel, El testimonio de Yarfoz, which seemed to me the most ingenious and inventive. I picked them just because I like them and because they seem like a joyful creation, especially the part about the begging baboons; the part about the ramp is a bit tedious because it’s difficult to describe.
IN CONVERSATION WITH THE DEAD
I’m not familiar with that Quevedo sonnet—I don’t really like him as an author. I prefer the dead of my own family, of which there are many, but the authors who I would mention are not authors I read for pleasure, but rather read to use in essays. I’ll mention several books that are, you might say, those I frequently reference. Almost all of them, oddly enough, are German. One is Austrian Karl Bühler, his Sprachtheorie, the Theory of Language, and the Theory of Expression. Another is Theordor Wiesengrund Adorno, all of his works except the one on Aesthetics, which is unintelligible. No one understands his Aesthetics. And also Max Weber, all of his work, especially Economy and Society and The Sociologies of Religion. Those two in particular. And maybe some other types of works as well, like a field study examining the practices of certain industrial workers and the way the parts and muscles of the human body, and its proper movements, compare with the violent and twisted movements that in some cases industrial-manual labor requires of them, but apparently they don’t like field studies. It’s odd, but the writers who interest me most are theorists.
Those are the authors who I consult and cite, among several others. The influence just comes about from consulting the text. If Adorno has something on what I’m looking for, well I go to the text, and there you go; or I transcribe it or cite it without transcribing it or paraphrase it, but it is always a conscious consultation, with one exception, employed all the time and unique for being a literary author, that is Franz Kafka, who seems to me the most extraordinary author of this century as well as many prior centuries.
CODA
Critics have said that you are “the twentieth century author with the greatest lexical richness and that you use the language with the greatest precision and meticulousness. That the breadth of your narrative register does not cease to amaze, from fantasy to the objectivity of El Jarama.” All told, this precision has an impressionistic poetic and a symbolic strength. The fantastical world of prince Nébride comes to seem even more real than reality itself. In the beginning was the word. Could Yarfoz and prince Nébride be a sort of fantastical Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Prince Nébride seems to be a character of uncertain destiny.
The greatest lexical richness is false because what I have are prohibitions—self-prohibitions—and not a very broad vocabulary. For example, I can’t say “efectuar.” I never use the verb efectuar or the verb realizar. I always say “hacer” and I was greatly annoyed when I discovered that the verb efectuar was already in use in the sixteenth century. I am precise and meticulous in terms of description, but it’s not richness of vocabulary. Sometimes I have a predilection for antiquated words—some—very few, but that’s another story.
I don’t now how to apply personality and fate to these characters, but they aren’t characters of personality. They are characters of fate because they are part of a plot; here, for example, they are going into exile. They have personalities like everyone, but the manifestation of their personalities is not part of the plot. They have almost no personality, but they do have fate; things happen to them, they do things. So the previous comparison of Yarfoz and prince Nébride, because they are on horseback, is absolutely ridiculous, in the first place because Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are definitely characters of personality and all of Quixote is the manifestation of their personalities. Besides, mounts—the donkey and the horse—are subject to sumptuary norms of the time in which Quixote was written, perhaps they were in decline, but up until then the mount you rode was symbolic of your social status. It was prohibited for a peasant like Sancho Panza to ride a horse. Maybe already in the seventeenth century some peasants did because there were so many bandits who rode horses around the end of the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the seventeenth, but before then horses were status symbols, and the “nobleman” Alonso Quijano the Good had to ride a horse, as the word caballero (horseman) indicates. This is emphasized by, although I do not know until when, the fact that the mule was the mount of the clergy. The clerics rode mules, the caballeros rode horses, and peasants rode donkeys.
I could point out that the Christian interpreters of the Gospel say that Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem on a donkey because it was a humble mount. Out of humility. The donkey was the sumptuary mount as the victory song shows, the Song of Deborah (Judges 5:10). It was the mount of the most noble. There were