(Mi) Writing and city
A week ago I participated
Eñe in this mini-festival on the relationship between urban space and my writing:
"One day receive an e-mail the author of comics Leandro Alzate. His words I am intrigued by the precision and simplicity to express how I work my texts. Leandro tells me she likes my way of developing in the urban fiction and it is sustained only in the modulation of feelings as the narrative thread. A few emails then begins to emerge the possibility of collaboration. Mal Leo given the comic book published in Astiberri Leandro, and has a minimum history, terrible and beautiful teenagers, I speak of the concern that I cause its blurry and almost empty stage, a concern, I say, which is the possibility that the bolts of openness. Buildings could be demolished tomorrow industrial buildings, alleys, lots and, finally, a landscape of ruins but not projected into the past, but that is balanced between this and a strange future. I say yes, they do not cost me my line open their scenarios, and then he sends me a series of photographs, all points of passage: a corridor, an underground passage, the stairs of a ferry.
In an interview with EL Doctorow few months ago appeared in Chimera, the author, referring to Homer and Langley , his latest novel, he said some very interesting things about writing. The first is that the writer of a myth, giving the meaning of legend, myth, something that holds a mystery that is to unravel because it presupposes that hides a key determinant, ie, a meaning. Without But Doctorow notes that this sense is the end, when the work is written, and not before. I have here the words of American author because, in so far as the town is still for me a kind of legend, mystery theme is far from exhausted (and pass me revealed why hell I install it), to move to the level of sense can only be a sham. However, I am obliged to do so because this is a conference and not a fiction, and I'm friendly formats. I take it, and you also should do, that what I say here are only hypotheses about the role that the city is creating in my work, and that the hypothesis can, and even to the extent I conceive of writing as discovery and not as a thesis, must be false.
I think the best way to approach the matter is to proceed as if I had to explain a tag tags. These tags are the concepts that come to mind when I think of the city and how it is treated through the literature. One of those tags that, if this a blog, it would appear with letters rather fat, would be the "center-periphery." Call center to everything that is establishing the identity of a city, not just the space labeled as such on maps. Usually this space and the identity of the city match, to the point that sometimes it is reduced to the typical map of downtown hotels to offer their customers courtesy of El Corte Ingles. But let's go to the Spain of the 80. In cities like Valencia old town was impassable, and the good people would have none of the rabble who lived there or decrepit buildings. The course was pure center periphery bourgeois citizen, who had the power to define what was and what was not the city, nor trod nor mint, and those old streets and no plan to rehabilitate them were converted into sewers. If I stick to my definition of the center, the lagoon, included in all tours a day (the Lagoon is about 10 miles south of Valencia), was in those years that the central ciutat vella. Within this framework, the periphery would obviously what is excluded from national identity. What is left out of the map of El Corte Ingles, but so that, being inside, not defining.
is very unlikely that any of my fiction will elapse in a downtown setting. It happens that the painter Antonio Lopez, who said in an interview that what inspired him was not the center, but outside. When I see pictures of, for example, rive gauche , Manhattan or the Great Way, I can not see the post. It is widely reckoned places that embody our current myths, ie the hanging narratives that identify us. To that extent, are over-interpreted, and re Doctorow, although these mythical sites, his legend is referred to history, not the mystery. The over-interpretation can be fruitful for many writers, for the end of the literature does not merely tell the same thing over and over again. However, I can not settle on this type of scenario, I weigh too much of their significant burden, and I'd rather go to places indefinite, open-stroke, like the drawings of Leandro Alzate I mentioned before or by shifting the argument to the plane of the plot, as the legend returns Doctorow's novel, the two freaks brothers Diogenes syndrome, this peripheral issue in any case it was strange for the author's claim: count the American century. By the way, Doctorow also said to have met some writers who after much research on the subject of his novels were dry, because the know they ruined the ability to create.
The tag that comes second in my blog thickness of imagination is that of "polis city, ie a space and where there is a fabric that allows a political city. The city-polis, the place where joint projects are possible, is something that comes afterwards, when I think about writing and about my fixation with certain cityscapes. I've said before that the centers of the cities are over-interpreted, in addition to representing a hierarchy (since they emit value), but somehow the suburbs are also overinterpretations: films, series and books about, say, Harlem or Carabanchel, or, and since it will be very questionable whether or Carabanchel Harlem are periphery, the evening soap opera Antena 3, whose characters tend to live in dormitory towns, or social cinema banlieue and the shack. However, this over-interpretation space occupies a very secondary. In books and films that take place in New York or Paris the narrators and the camera gives a good account of the streets, whereas in the soap opera Antenna 3 did not leave the house, or the Montoya family hut in the documentary on Roma settlements. We know nothing on the subject of outer space, and indeed is logically so, since there is no urban fabric, ie there is no public space, city. Back to the words of Leandro Alzate, who told me in his email that my storylines are based solely on the modulation of feelings, and I add: of the feelings within an urbanized area not necessarily be the space city, or even because of it. Sometimes I have the impression that my writing is synonymous with custard (a word which, incidentally, I hate), and I lift frames that are an excuse for my characters traveling on certain spaces which are usually a periphery urbanite to another where the city fades. I'm exaggerating, yes, but not much. I honestly do not know what led me to explore the inhospitable territory, certainly has to do with the unknown and the possibility and, in connection with the latter, and returning to the concept of polis, sometimes I think that the periphery , the decomposition of living, represents us better citizens because we failed. I also think that putting my characters to roam byways or sites that do not pass (imagine if I had to shoot a movie in a development I protagonist absurdly walk around the neighborhood) is somehow made habitable in that territory, make cops, but of course all of these interpretations are complacent, and it makes sense to admit that I do not know exactly why my writing some areas fire .
Discuss the tag "city as a generator of identity", or as disintegrating forces me to revisit the issue of center and periphery play with various possibilities of the most obvious and We have spoken: Downtown as a generator of identity, where the city is already written, compared to the periphery, it dissolves, however, these boundaries are mobile, as are the effects they may have on us: in this sense, perhaps ; be more decisive as to generate a strong identity refers to a landscape of buildings of official protection than the Eiffel Tower. Only add to what I said before I avoid naming enclaves like the Museo del Prado, so that if in some fictional character to put to work in the Prado, I would say simply "the museum." However, if the narrative action took place in, for example, Talavera Queen's or Tragacete, to appoint me profusely applied, precisely because they are centers of anything, and so are the opposite of what a certain type of reader that sometimes I expect myself as the setting for a novel or story. I think sometimes is violating, among other things, going against the prevailing taste, and when I say taste, ie aesthetics, I also mean ethics. "
