For much of human history, intellectual and cultural life revolved around ensuring our concept of reality squared with what was in front of us. At certain periods of time, in certain cultures and circles, this impulse was directed into a conception of how reality ought to be understood and the corresponding type of person who was able to embody that understanding. This conception saw reality as necessarily bound in such a way that to know anything was to know everything. Reality was a totality and could only be understood as such. The aim, then, came to be to know how what hangs over us hangs together.
This picture of the world and of our place in it had already been progressively blurred and marred by modernity even before the Second World War; after the Second World War, totality became suspect as tastes turned against any account (scientific, moral, political, literary, or otherwise) that insisted on its utter coherence. Reality shattered out of our grasp and the few fragments we held onto became much more indeterminate and unruly than we had previously appreciated. The world that we thought was whole and knowable turned out in fact to be partial and oblique.
It is at the tatters of this (self-)image that Agustín Fernández Mallo—physicist, poet, philosopher, novelist, performance artist, and critic—writes. Whereas much literature responds to the crisis of representation that defined postmodernism with an inwards turn, Fernández Mallo differs radically in his approach. His writing—as exemplified in his notorious Nocilla trilogy—is peripatetic and kaleidoscopic, shifting from one place to another while always illuminating the variety of perspectives located in each. His world is our world, not the world of literature. It is a world defined by migration, precarity, instability, by hourslong intercontinental travel and deep-sea communications cables. Overwhelmingly, it is pastiche.
Yet, despite the myriad of juxtapositions, Fernández Mallo’s representation of this world is never itself pastiche. The cumulative effect of all the contrasts and comparisons is an increasing sense of self-recognition: this is life for us as it is lived now. This is our reality. If figures like Newton thought that the only alternative to hierarchical order was chaos, Fernández Mallo offers up the rhizome. Rather than the classical idea of order as a tree, Fernández Mallo draws on Deleuze and Guattari for an idea of order as akin to a network of roots: horizontally inclined, interrelated, dynamic, alive and growing. The rhizome is the conceptual image at the heart of Mallo’s work, that of an interconnectivity that persists in and through fragmentation. This image plays out both in form and in content. Mallo’s writing blends the natural sciences, comic books, Sunday morning television, and all other kinds of pop culture, sprinkling them with erudite literary and philosophical references for good measure. While he is not the first to mix so-called high and low cultures , Fernández Mallo distinguishes himself from others before him through the almost algorithmic tenor of his work. The oscillations in genre, form, and perspective found in his writing mirrors the experience of scrolling through one’s feed on Instagram or X, if only because of the sheer diversity of characters with which Fernández Mallo populates his writings. Real life figures such as Che Guevara feature alongside sex workers, scientists, and a man who lives inside Singapore’s Changi airport.
With his Nocilla Trilogy, Fernández Mallo has created a kaleidoscopic romp that reveals something new about contemporary subjectivity. The overwhelming barrage of information we are bombarded with everyday effectively depersonalizes us, rendering us spectre-like insofar as our digital existence can be compared to a ghost—a perfect spectator, if ever there was one—peering in on the diverse manifestations of the still living. His fragmented approach captures the shattering of subjectivity inherent to the digital globalised world in which we live.
This search for order in chaos speaks to Fernández Mallo’s work as a physicist. What is remarkable is his understanding of literature as revealing reality to us, albeit via different methods, like the sciences do. In doing so, Fernández Mallo dares to provide literature an epistemic status that almost everyone—readers and writers alike—has renounced. If there is any relation between literature and reality, the received wisdom might say that it consists of capturing the subjective truth of inner life. Fernández Mallo breaks with this convention and accords literature the same access to the truth as the sciences, although he does admit that the verification methods of literature are less reliable. The result of this is an expansive literature that is bold in its experimentation and subject matter because it is motivated by a desire to represent the truth. The side of truth that Fernández Mallo illuminates is contemporary life at its most contemporary—full of the novel alternating oddities and peculiarities that now make up the rhythm of daily life. It is a representation of life that is only whole—only complete—in being broken: a truth that is only true through fragmentation. If reality is ruptured, then so must literature.
—Sebastián Sánchez, Assistant Interview Editor
When asked how they came to write, writers tend to credit—akin to Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”—an encounter with a poem or novel which gave them a creative epiphany and led them on the path to literature. Others credit an experience: in his poem “Se Canta al Mar” (Poemas y anti-poemas), Nicanor Parra wrote of the first time he saw the sea (en aquel día / Nació en mi mente la inquietud y el ansia / De hacer en verso lo que en ola y ola / Dios a mi vista sin cesar creaba). Given the importance of non-literary influences in your work, I was wondering whether there was a similar event or events in your youth where your imagination and feelings were captivated by art or nature. If so, was this a literary encounter or a different kind of aesthetic experience?
In my case, I cannot identify a particular moment when my interest in writing began. It was rather a gradual process. Throughout my early youth, I had always been very interested in literature and the arts, but not with the intention of dedicating myself to them professionally. At the same time, while I was studying physics, I perceived in the sciences its own kind of aesthetic, since the sciences are a human construction and all our activity must necessarily involve a creative dimension and a choice made according to a criterion of subjective emotion. Somehow, while studying, the idea of combining the two things took shape in me, that is, to investigate reality but with methods that drew from literature, arts and the sciences, and for this I used metaphor (and analogy) as a method of investigating reality (over the years, this would be called Postpoetry). At first, I was interested in applying this process to poetry (I come from poetry and I consider everything I do to be poems, although sometimes I disguise them as novels or essays). Then, with Nocilla Dream, I started with the novel. But going back to my years as a physics student, soon after I saw that what excited me as a possibility for writing had already been done in some way by Heraclitus, Lucretius or Borges. If I have to choose an author through whom I “became” a writer, it is Borges, and, in particular, when I was eighteen and read The Maker, where the Argentine writer combined high literature with logical-scientific arguments. It was something moving, very stimulating. I dealt with all these things in two essays, Postpoesía and Teoría general de la basura. What I can tell you for sure is that when I started, I never dreamed that my literature would be translated into thirteen languages nor, for example, that I would be interviewed for Asymptote. And I think that that ignorance is fine. I never wallow in success, I simply forget it and move on to things that are new to me, things that stimulate me.
I’m interested in this idea that the sciences themselves have their own aesthetic. This comes across forcefully in your poetry, where science is portrayed not as a source of artistic inspiration but almost a form of poetry in its own right. (In Postpoesíá you go as far as to cite the view that science is the new and legitimate poetry of the twenty-first century.) In the humanities people often talk about the disenchantment of nature brought about by the sciences, where they allege the sciences have turned the natural world from a place of wonder and mystery into a cold, hard, deterministic realm. There are elements of this in your work, where in Yo siempre regreso a los pezones y al punto 7 del Tractatus the narrator claims his vocation forces him to see the night sky “as it really is: accidental, morally neutral, and incredibly violent”. Later on, this speaker also says “Our story was an equation. An act of faith.”—a comparison which is at odds with a reductive understanding of the sciences as something purely objective and detached, a view you yourself reject in Postpoesía. Where do you stand on the question of disenchantment—is beauty not something in nature, but rather something that arises from our attempts to understand nature through the sciences? As a human construction, does science require as much faith as art?
Of course science requires as much faith as art, the only difference is that science is a faith that has endowed itself with mechanisms of verification much more effective than other human endeavours, because they are methods that are reproducible in all space and time, that is, they can be transferred from one place to another and from one time to another and still work. Now, I do not think that the arts have less legitimacy than the sciences; instead, it’s that the arts tend to validate their works by means of metaphor: they establish more or less valid metaphors that are more or less convincing in their present space and time, although they are usually restricted to a more determinate culture than the sciences. For me, the sciences are no more the “truth” than the arts. Each produces reality anew, they generate a reality that did not exist before by means of different methods. That said, and we must be careful here, science also constantly uses metaphors, although it also makes use of other kinds of mechanisms, and these give it another force, another kind of argumentative power, although not necessarily one of conviction. For example, people are often convinced of things that are completely unprovable and nonsensical, from classic examples such as miracles in religion to people who believe that we have a “negative energy” and a “positive energy”, or others who believe that the Earth is flat, etc. That is, sometimes it doesn’t matter if you prove that a miracle is impossible because whoever has faith will always keep faith. And this is the key difference, that is why the sciences and the arts advance the world and religions do not: the sciences and the arts are the only human endeavours that are sufficiently self-critical, the only ones that start from the premise that tomorrow they can change, unlike beliefs based on faith, which ultimately promote static, submissive and uncritical societies. The new currents of syncretic thought have given rise to New Age philosophy—such as what I was saying before about “negative energies”, or modes of ancestral healing that, except as a placebo, obviously do not work and yet are nonetheless very fashionable today among Western artists (which are nothing more than the classic and colonial fascination in the West for the word “exotic” in the twenty-first-century version)—have much to do with this faith-based and, ultimately, uncritical and submissive thinking. In short: for me both the arts and the sciences are part of the humanities (the sciences are made by humans, not by extraterrestrials, therefore they are also humanities), because both investigate the world and create reality by making use of critical thought. I dedicate many pages to this in my last essay La forma de la multitud (The Form of the Multitude).
Given that the arts lack the trans-spatiotemporal reproducibility of the sciences, their metaphors being more bound by the culture(s) of their time and place, what do you believe makes a work of art, or at least a work of literature, “timeless”? Of course, only if you believe such a thing is possible. Does a work endure through fulfilling a double function: metaphors that can have both particular historical resonance and a universal resonance? Now that I think about it, the influences you cite tend towards modernity and the twentieth century.
Well, it is clear that the arts and literature lack supposedly objective mechanisms and methodologies that validate their results over space and time. However, they do possess what we can call an empirical or experiential mechanism. Let me explain: obras maestras (masterpieces), (which I call obras modernas (modern works), using “modern” in the etymological sense of the word), do not capture the sense of a historical period taxonomized as part of a universal history. So, why do we say that Don Quixote is a classic? Because it says something to each generation, each generation can extract from this work arguments and ideas to build their present and realize a future. That is why, for me, Don Quixote is not a classic but a modern work, and the same happens with the work of Heraclitus, of Lucretius, of Leonardo da Vinci, or with the painting of Velázquez or the poetry of Baudelaire (just to mention a small number of examples): the works of these creators continue to tell us new things because their works are reinterpreted by each new generation. We can say that each generation “completes” those works, so that we arrive at the paradoxical, but for me very powerful, conclusion that any work considered “classic”—that is, what I call “modern” —is so because it is unfinished, it is incomplete, and therein lies its strength and timelessness. A work that was totally finished and complete would be a dead work. Whoever wants to know more about this can refer to the General Theory of Rubbish.
The story of how you came to write the novels which gained you notoriety—the Nocilla Trilogy—is well known. In 2004, while you were travelling through the north of Thailand, you were hit by a motorbike. Confined to your hotel room, you wrote Nocilla Dream by hand in three weeks. However, an overwhelming majority of people who are hit by motorbikes do not write novels, let alone one like Nocilla Dream. In the Anglophone world, this is often presented as the beginning of your career as a writer—as if this accident turned you into a literary savant, like the surgeon who became a pianist after being struck by lightning. The truth is that by this time you were a published poet who had already coined his own method, Postpoetic poetry. Could you tell us more about how you came to poetry and its importance to your later development as a novelist?
Well, I have partly answered this in my previous answers, but I will add that before writing Nocilla Dream, for me the novel was a genre to which I did not give much credit, that's why I dedicated myself only to poetry and, occasionally, to essays. I suppose that like any young poet I had a certain smugness, a certain sense of doing something pure, something not subject to the market, etc., and to achieve those aspirations, poetry and thought were perfect. Later, as a joke from destiny, I became known in much of the world for my novels; I suppose that is a good lesson in how life is a complex system that cannot be programmed. But I must say that I still believe that poetry and the essay have much more to do with each other than either of those two genres have with the novel. To me, poetry is a way of investigating reality and creating reality, exactly like the essay (and by extension the sciences). The novel is something a little different: it is true that every novel must talk about reality and must analyze it, but part of it must also be entertaining, and through this it relates to the entertainment industry. It’s not that I have anything against the entertainment industry, I’m just saying that it’s not the same as poetry or essays. On the other hand, for me there are only two literary genres: the realistic and the old-fashioned. I mean that every literary work, whatever canonical genre it may be, must be realistic in the sense that it must speak to the reality of its time, it must be able to be in conversation with its time; whether that be about wars or social problems that exist in reality, or rather extraterrestrial ships or imaginary worlds. In any case, if it is a serious work with aspirations of longevity, it must question its time. But as the reality of each time changes, so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore. In our case, the realism of our time, I called it Complex Realism (explained in the General Theory of Rubbish). But returning to your question: yes, the writing of Nocilla Dream was in a way an ironic singular point, an epiphany, since after disavowing the genre of the novel I wrote—almost without realizing it—a novel that they say has contributed to changing a part of literature. In short, it was then I realized that through the novel it was also possible to do something similar to what I was looking for in poetry and essays. A kind of squaring of the circle that worked out well!
In Postpoesía, your manifesto of sorts, you argued that poetry in Spain had been left in the dust by all other forms of artistic creation as it failed to confront the new reality we lived in. This was a result of sticking to orthodox methods. To remedy this, you proposed a new aesthetic: Postpoetry. This aesthetic seeks to turn poetry into the vanguard of the arts by turning it into a site of “collision” between different disciplines—poetry, science, architecture, economics, etc.—which will engender new forms of innovation. The poet must become a scavenger, if not thief: poetry must be as varied, groundless, and fragmented as our contemporary lives are now. Your multidisciplinary poetry exemplifies this, incorporating mathematical equations, drawings, performance art, and digital images. On a formal level, what is it about traditional poetry that means it fails to grasp reality as it is now, and what is it about Postpoetry that allows it to succeed where traditional poetry fails? Is it in the different ways they represent reality?
Basically, it happens for two reasons, which actually feed back on each other. The first one is that the most orthodox poetry, by becoming a dogmatic system, stops being interested in anything new, and as a consequence it does not look for new forms or new solutions to challenges that new sensibilities propose and demand, and that is why new forms of expression appear outside the orthodoxy. I have to say, in defence of poetry in Spanish, that in the time that has elapsed since I edited that book (2009) and today, there has been a great leap and poetry is one of the riskiest and most fruitful literary activities (at least in Spanish), much more so than narrative fiction. It is curious how in the last fifteen years poetry and essay have been configured as genres that explain and propose reality in a much more incisive way than narrative fiction, which has become more conservative (I would like to think that my essay Postpoesía, contributed a little to that change in Spanish-language poetry). This coincides with what I have always thought: poetry and essay have more to do with each other than narrative fiction has to do with either of those two genres. It’s funny, in my last novel, Atom Heart Mother, I relate how my father told me precisely that (he didn’t give as much value to the novel as he did to the essay or poetry because he told me that the novel was “something else”.) I remember that we had many arguments about it. Well, with time, although I still don’t agree with him, I have to admit that he was a little bit right.
What reasoning did your father provide and what leads you to disagree with him? I would be inclined to agree with him, as someone who studied philosophy and who translates poetry. One answer which strikes me—not one I necessarily agree with—is that poetry and the essay (according to some) are concerned, in very different ways, with grasping things by the root, as they really are in their totality. This requires a directness and precision of meaning that both forms share. Whereas a cynic might think that the novel is concerned with narrative and through this entertainment, and therefore the aim of the novel is pleasure rather than truth. Alternatively, Plato would say that poetry can only render a cheap falsifying reproduction of the truth, and many novelists would say that narrativity captures a vital component of the reality of human life.
I have to make the initial caveat that, for me, there are things that are novels but sold as poetry. And there are other things that are sold as novels which are more like poetry. That is to say, for me, any text that is articulated through analogy in general (simile, metaphors, etc.), and not through syllogistic reasoning (formal logic), is a poetic text. In this sense, for example, Borges’ stories seem to me to be poetry even if they are not written in verse. In other words: I understand poetry as an investigation of reality not through syllogism (for example, as detective novels or narrative poetry do), but through metaphor and analogies. It is investigating reality with a tool that is a little different from the scientific one, but at the end of the day it is an investigation. In my poetry collection Ya nadie se llamará como yo (Seix Barral, 2015), I have a verse that sums it up:
Poetry is not
literature, and if anything
it is its science.
This trilogy was defined by fragmentation and fluidity. It was self-consciously in a vein of radicalism that stretched from the Dadaists and surrealists to punk, with “Nocilla” referring to a song by the Galician punk group Siniestro Total. The trilogy was nonetheless a resounding success and widely read by the literary establishment it was at the same time disrupting. How do you understand the success of your work—did you think there would be such a thirst for literary invention and formal experimentation? And how have you personally taken the success? I recall reading in a Spanish paper once that you said you did not become a writer to go to parties, but so you could stay at home and write.
The success of a cultural object is always a mystery, otherwise everyone would know how to make one. I don’t know how to answer your question. I guess what happened is that the public expected something new but didn’t know what. I wrote something I didn’t quite control, driven by social, poetic, scientific, artistic (conceptual art) or musical intuitions, but without knowing very well if it was something that would connect with people. Actually, I wrote it as I still write everything: for myself, without thinking about the readers, to expand my poetic investigation of my world. And suddenly there was this coincidence, this “match”. I was looking for something new and the readers were looking for something new, two searches that miraculously coincided. Thinking about all this later, I have come to the conclusion that one of the keys is that Nocilla Dream is written (involuntarily, it was something spontaneous) with a network structure (an analogue network) which allowed me to eliminate at once the aesthetic and structural hierarchies of the classic novel, and also allowed me in a single loop (in a single link), to metaphorically connect issues of high and low culture without going through intermediate justifications. That is, the network structure is opposed to the classical and hierarchical tree-like structure. This instantly clicked with a society that was beginning to operate in a network in all senses, both in its day-to-day life and in cultured registers (let’s remember that the concept of rhizome as a model of thought had already been formulated by Deleuze and Guattari years ago). That, together with the themes themselves, a poetically constructed mixture of issues of mass consumer society and the new social and aesthetic configurations to which globalized society was leading us, I think that ended up forming the success of the Nocilla Project. Well, and something else: we did not write experimental prose that mistreats the reader, but on the contrary, we wrote prose that, being experimental and new, the reader thinks that they are effortlessly discovering all by themselves. That’s the most important thing when you write: that the reader feels that he is smarter than you and that he knows more than you, that he believes that he is discovering everything by himself and that you are only accompanying him in his discoveries and epiphanies. And regarding parties: obviously, I didn’t become a writer to go to parties or to liven bourgeois events, that social model of the writer has always seemed to me a complete vulgarity associated with the romantic myth of the cursed artist.
You begin this response by affirming that you write for yourself but end it by discussing the importance of not alienating the reader in your experimentation. You remind the reader of Socrates in the Symposium claiming that he teaches no one nothing, he is only a midwife helping each individual to birth the ideas that were already in them—which I think is the correct approach. The question of difficulty and experimentation is an important one. I think that you strike the right balance and that this is demonstrated in your success—your work is radically experimental, but neither is it esoteric or the type of work to be appreciated only by a few peers. What do you think tempers—if you think it is tempered—your experimentation? Is it your multidisciplinary approach, in the range of inspiration you draw from? Or is it in your dedication to representing reality as it is?
That is something I have often asked myself, without getting a clear answer. A writer once told me that the success of my literature consisted in knowing how to “manage complexity”, but I don’t really know how to do that: it’s something spontaneous. One possible explanation is that I wrote in “network mode” instead of in a hierarchical tree-like system. That is, maybe other attempts have not had the same impact as mine because they tried to do something experimental but under the echo of a classical structure. Remember that the tree system is hierarchical by definition. And then there is what I just discussed, which is very important for me: to write well is to write complex things (but not complicated, which is in fact the opposite of complex), that nonetheless make the reader believe that he is smarter than you. That is to say, to stay in the background, not to be the schoolyard bully, not to submit the reader to your whim, not to make them feel at the mercy of your whims. This is something I learned from Borges, who said that you have to narrate as if you were a bit daft, as if you didn’t control everything you were narrating, to give the reader room to find it all by himself without too much effort. That’s why I don’t like authors like Pynchon, who I sometimes see as bullies, who write as if they want to be above the reader, to show that they are smarter than the reader, and for me writing is just the opposite: to let the reader think that you have put him on the right path so that he can surpass you. That’s the magic of literature. To sum it up: writing through metaphors and analogies, not syllogisms (which are ultimately mere Sunday magazine crossword puzzles and have nothing to do with intelligence itself but rather a kind of specialized ignorance).
Another aspect of the Nocilla group was an oppositional attitude towards Spanish culture itself, which in previous interviews you have suggested was parochial and formally uncreative. Your literary influences are broad, but also distinctly not-Spanish. Your literary Spanish-language influences tend towards Latin America, such as Borges. What do you think it was that made Spanish culture so averse to formal experimentation, especially given how much of it occurred in Latin America in the latter half of the twentieth century, despite the similar pressures of military dictatorship and religious conservatism? To what extent do you identify with Spain?
I very much identify with the poetry that has been produced in Spain, from the mystic classics (St. John of the Cross, Teresa de Ávila) to the poetry of the 1950s (Antonio Gamoneda, José Ángel Valente, Claudio Rodríguez, etc.). I believe that my poetic formation followed in this Spanish tradition, as well as that of Latin Americans like those two giants Nicanor Parra and Lezama Lima. On the other hand, beyond a few Spanish authors who have influenced me (Juan Benet, Carmen Laforet and Martín Santos), I do not identify directly with the novelistic tradition that has been developed in Spain, I have been much more influenced by all the Latin Americans of the so-called boom (Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo, etc.) as well as Central Europeans such as Thomas Bernhard, Ernst Jünger and Canetti, or Anglo-Saxons such as J. G. Ballard and Don DeLillo, or others as diverse as Pascal Quignard, Boris Vian or W. G. Sebald. And, of course, the conceptual arts and sciences in general, their esprit de corps and the way I could “translate” them into literature. I mean, my background is not at all orthodox in that sense. All the bad TV series have influenced me a lot, from Little House on the Prairie to Knight Rider, or other more serious ones that are my very own Mount Olympus, such as Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks. And to the question of why I think Spanish literature was so conservative compared to Latin American literature, well, I don’t know, but I think that, in general, and especially since World War II, the arts in Latin America and the United States are much more audacious and more lacking in aesthetic prejudices. And this makes sense, America was and still is the New World, and as such, it is being formed, and something can only be formed by experimenting, looking for the best, taking risks. It is an attitude that I like.
I am glad you mentioned Juan de la Cruz. In your first published collection of poetry, the title refers to Wittgenstein’s infamous seventh proposition in the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” In the poem itself, the speaker is said to have called Wittgenstein the great mystic of our times and that he will one day be read like Juan de la Cruz is read now. These figures are, of course, united by one thing: the ineffable, the unsayable which we are nonetheless compelled to say. Neither writer was struck dumb but instead wrote plenty. I increasingly see your work as also defined by a concern for the ineffable and the idea that the limits of our language are the limits of our reality. Both Wittgenstein and Juan de la Cruz recognized that the ineffable does not entail silence, but rather an obligation to carry language and form to its limits. The tireless experimentation of your work is a testament to this as well, I believe. How do you see the ineffable figuring in your own work?
Well, perhaps at the beginning of my work the ineffable was indeed a source of exploration and an inspiration to experiment with new things. But at a certain point I realized that it was useless, it happened when I was writing my essay General Theory of Rubbish—which deals with complex systems in literature, the arts and other cultural manifestations—which is why I was forced to write a whole chapter about the aporia to which the belief in the ineffable as a true representation of the world leads. On the contrary, things are what they are in virtue of the dialectical back and forth between what they say and what they do not say, between emptiness and matter, and so on. The vessel is a vessel because of the interaction between the emptiness it contains and the walls it possesses, the poem says what it says because of the interaction between the words involved in the metaphor and the ineffable that the metaphor itself generates, and so on. I think this is implicitly expressed in some of my novels, such as The Book of All Loves, or The Things We Have Seen. In the field of the essay, this led me to develop in abundance, both in the General Theory of Rubbish and in The Form of the Multitude, a whole theory about intensive variables and extensive variables (which would take a lot of time and space to explain) and its connection with the well-known Body Without Organs (BWO) of Deleuze and Guattari, a theory that would come to reinforce the idea that the ineffable in itself does not mean anything although it acts as an asymptotic limit.
Thomas Bunstead has translated most of your work into English. How did this partnership come about and what is the translation process like for you?
He was the translator that Fitzcarraldo suggested; it was the editor, Jacques Testard, who proposed it, and I put myself in his hands. Since Nocilla Dream, he has translated all my books into English (five in total and, with Atom Heart Mother, there will be six). It is a pleasure to work with Tom, he has taken the poetic tone that I spoke of before on very well. The important thing in my stories are the metaphorical connections that are woven into a network, and to translate that you have to be very subtle and very sensitive to these processes and attuned to an analogical mode (they work by analogies and metaphors, not by syllogisms!). His translations are already famous. I remember when it was necessary to make adaptations of the translation into American English, when Farrar Straus and Giroux edited the Nocilla Trilogy, a moment in which he entered into perfect symbiosis with the English of that country and the result was magnificent.
The latest work of yours to be published by Fitzcarraldo, The Book of All Loves, is hard to pin down—incorporating poetic and essayistic elements into a fictional narrative. You followed up the Nocilla Trilogy with the more narrative-based The Thing We’ve Seen. You have also recently published a non-creative essay, La forma de la multitud, which analyses, among many other things, the development of subjectivity and identity under our distinctly digital form of capitalism. One thing that unites your work is this restless experimentation in form. How do you understand your development as a writer and the position you are in now? Do your approach and interests differ radically from those you had when you wrote Nocilla Dream?
First of all, my last novel, Atom Heart Mother, which the critics have regarded as my best book in prose, and also happens to be my most personal, will be published in English in 2025 by Fitzcarraldo. To answer your question: of course, across twenty-five years your prose changes, you experience new forms, but the impulse of doing something new, something that excites me, something that is a leap into the void, is still there. For me it is a maxim: every new book is a leap into the void, otherwise it is like painting by numbers. Let me explain: when I wrote the Nocilla Project (Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, Nocilla Lab and a low tech movie), I didn’t know how to write something like that, I learned by doing it. By the time I finished writing that, I knew how to write prose like that, and I tackled other things. When I started writing The Things We’ve Seen, I didn’t know how to write prose like that either, I learned by doing it, and the same with The Book of All Loves, and with all my poetry collections or other novels or books like El hacedor (by Borges) remake. And as for the form, yes, my prose is no longer as explicitly in the network mode or as poetically dry as it was before; it has the structure of a network but the shape is different, and in terms of themes it has become “a little more European”.
The Anglophone world will be very lucky once Fitzcarraldo publishes the translation of Atom Heart Mother. Your work up to now has presented a form of self-effacement, or at least a constant disruption of subjectivity and perspective. Atom Heart Mother, on the other hand, is deeply personal, recounting the story of your father attempting to bring back to Galicia a score of cows from the United States. This is not to abdicate from your expansive vision; however, as the novel develops, the personal comes to magnify the universal. What inspired this change to the personal and how do you see the work as breaking with or developing on previous elements in your oeuvre?
Well, it happens to be a work of a very different character from the rest of my work. From the day my father died, in February 2012, I started writing it and I did not finish it until 2024. At little more than two hundred pages, in this book there is a whole life, several lives really, as well as deep reflections about what life, death, identity, the loss of the memory of a loved one, and so on, are. I mean that beyond the life of my father—which in itself is exciting (he was an extremely creative, sometimes even eccentric, veterinarian who did pioneering things that would surprise us today, like, in 1967, bringing cows to Spain in a cargo plane from Kansas, with him traveling with the pilots in the cabin)—there is a whole exploration of what is the loss of memory. For example, the day when your father no longer recognizes you due to his senile dementia, it is as if the scenery of the world changes, as if everything you have seen in your life until then was a lie. Then, a void opens at your feet, a vertigo arises when you look your father in the eyes and have to ask yourself “who is there?”, because that is the big question that concerns us, who is in there? Since then, two ideas guide my life, 1) reality is not reality but a desire, and 2) identity is a hallucination of the ego. Well, as you can see, it is such a personal book as a result of these reasons. That’s why it took me twelve years to write it, because I did not want it to be a documentary, I wanted it to have the style of a novel, but that is not easy to do with such a personal and intimate subject. Now, I feel that after writing this book my narrative fiction will be different, I’m not sure I can continue writing novels as I did before. I don’t know, we’ll see how it all develops.
Thank you for this response—anyone who reads the novel will be struck by the consideration and care with which you deal with these topics, both as a son and as a writer. I guess the end of your answer suggests that it would be either greedy or impatient of me to ask about what comes next. Independent of your uncertainty regarding how your novels might evolve, you deserve a good rest from them after your achievement with Madre. But might there be other works, or even ideas, that you might be pursuing at the moment that you would like to tell us about?
Yes, of course, I’m working on many texts and ideas; in fact, I always work on several books in different genres at the same time. I am working on a book about my mother, who passed away three months ago. I am glad because at least she was here to see Atomic Heart Mother published (a book that despite its title is not about my mother but about my father; when you read it you understand why). The issue is that I started writing it when she was still alive, and now, once she is dead, I have realized that I cannot continue narrating her in the same way and tone, because the life of someone alive is not approached in the same way as the life of someone dead. This has led me to realize a “philosophical” but also poetic insight: writing in the register of a novel about someone alive configures a fiction, but writing in the register of a novel about someone already dead configures a judgement. And when I say judgement, I do not mean to judge morally the life of a person, no, it is something very different, the idea that the roles of the characters in the plot of the work are already fixed and organized: they can no longer be changed as if the person was real and now has died. That is, it is as if the deceased person was condemned to a sentence which bars them from developing within a fiction in the same way that they could develop when alive. This has led me to read a lot about the question of what a judgement really is. It is an exciting topic, as, for example, Giorgio Agamben tries to resolve in all his work (for example, in the book in which he speaks of Pilate’s judgement of Jesus Christ).
On the other hand, I am in the advanced stages of working on a book-length essay on artificial intelligence, but not on its technological dimension—which does not interest me at all—but in its anthropological and religious dimension. It is something that I already argued in my essay The Form of the Multitude when I stated that the first forms of artificial intelligence were religions: systems of beliefs and instruments of a moral economy that we humans have created to pour everything that we cannot do or that surpasses us into, so that they can solve problems for us, and which, paradoxically, end up dominating us. A few months ago, I published the first chapter of the book in the Spanish magazine Jot Down (nº 46, March 2024), with the title “The Angel of Artificial Intelligence”.
La forma de la multitud seeks to diagnose contemporary life. Digital late capitalism—really, as you argue, a set of different forms of capitalism operating all at once—has effected a complete disruption and fragmentation of human life, leading to the end of any unitary culture or cohesive identity. The picture you paint is bleak, as there is seemingly no escape from where we find ourselves, only an intensification of our conditions. (That is not to say I think it is wrong.) You reject the established utopias which people have turned to: Christianity, Marxism, and free market capitalism. You are not a nihilist by any means, however, as in The Book of All Loves you seem to point towards one source of hope: love. The love between the two unnamed protagonists is a burning ember that keeps meaning and purpose alight in an otherwise apocalyptic world. (Then again, in La forma you also write that love in contemporary society has vanished and turned into hate for the other, so perhaps we need capitalism to bring about planetary collapse before love can build the world anew.) That said, love is not—at least how you present it—a collective source of hope, it is a deeply intimate relation between two persons. This led me to want to ask you if you believed in collective salvation, but salvation is perhaps too utopian a word for you, so instead I ask: do you believe in collective redemption?
Absolutely. But I go further than all of that: I believe in collective salvation and redemption because I believe there is nothing to be saved or redeemed from. The apocalypse does not exist, the apocalypse humans project into the future is an invention that we have been rehearsing for at least thirty centuries, and whose only function is and has been to frighten people in order to keep them under control. Remember that when you induce fear in a person you turn him into your puppet forever, there is nothing more desired by those in power than to have you in fear. Remember also that there are no civilizations or peoples that have not fictionalized their own apocalypse. It is a fiction that is in our nature. Obviously, the End of the World does not exist, each epoch generates problems that it has to solve, some of larger dimensions than others, but if there something that is not human, then it is mass suicide. The apocalypse belongs to a fictional dimension that only we humans have, a dimension that trees, the sea, ants or dogs do not have, but it is this difference that makes us human, that is, we are qualitatively different from the rest of objects and species in the world because of that fictional dimension (ultimately metaphorical). That drive to fictionalize (whether it is the apocalypse or writing the Iliad or imagining a trip to Venus, it doesn’t matter) is what I call prosthesis in The Form of the Multitude: we are constantly creating prostheses to make up for a lack we have, because since we are human we lack something and we don’t know what it is, and, in fact, I believe that this lack is a lack of something that never existed, it is an imaginary lack, so no matter how many prostheses we invent to make up for it, it will never be satisfied. But, mind you, that is why we are human: because we possess that dimension that through this “lack” leads us to invent art, politics, sciences, literature, etc.
