The damned and the beautiful

BEAUTY IS THE ONLY GENDER I BELIEVE IN

EUGENIA RICO

I don’t believe in literary genders.

Greatness is the only literary gender I believe in. Beauty and the search for a language that reflects the world inside our world is the only gender I believe in.

I cannot admit that is such a thing as a good novel without poetry or a good short story which is not like a micro-novel, for me the lyrics needs epic and the epic needs lyric.

Literary genders are a way of castrating the art, of making it became little as any other ways of categorizing people or things in life. The scope of the art is to free the reality from the categories. That’s why I am against the notion of genders.

From the beginning of my literary career when I wrote “The White death” I was having two objectives:

1- To develop my own kind of novel, the novel that will continue the evolution of novel as a literary gender.

2- To finish with the classification and the distinction among literary gender.

Not only between fiction and poetry or theatre and screenplay but the distinction that separates the noir from the science fiction and the philosophical novel from historical novels.

I think any great novel, any novel that is truly a work of art includes many literary genders, in some cases it is even the case that the novel is great only because of the mixture of the genders: The Ulysses of Joyce is a catalogue of prose that uses all the literary genders, this is his genuine value.

Because I think the evolution of the novel like the evolution of human being is not yet finish. My position is against the present literary World in which Commerce has substituted the value of genuine Literature.

Nowadays so many novels of the present are merely copies of great novels of the past, but yet history of novels as history of literature as the evolution of the human being has not finish jet.

The concept of the novel is like the concept of energy after Eisnteins the energy is not created or destroys is only transformed. After Joyce the novel is never created nor destroyed is only in permanent transformation.

That it is what I say that although we ought everything to the XIX Century the biggest Century of the novel we are now in the XXI Century and we need to Discovery new horizons for the novel.

The commercial market is insisting in producing bad copies of great works of the XIX Century. The “feuilleton” is one of the kinds of novel more often copiated and with worse results.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is not Alejandro Dumas but at least he is one of the good disciples of Eugenio O’Sue.

Instead of bad copies of great works my task is to look for new ways for the novel. New paths, new directions….

About the novel I am truly Hegelian:

THESIS: The great novel of the XIX Century which was the Century of the novel: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac they lead the way for the novel in the Stendhal idea of “ a mirror that reflect the path” It is the realistic novel, the classical concept of the novel for us. Proust opens this concept into this antithesis; he is the last one of the realistic novel and the first one of the vanguard (the avant-garde) the search for new stetic enjoyment in the fiction that will characterize the XX Century.

ANTITHESIS: The Avant-garde movements: from Joyce to Roland Barthes the formal search will open possibilities never seen before in the fiction. But maybe it will not produce so many great works of art.

SINTHESIS: The readers get tired of the “avant garde” fiction, which too often deceive their expectations of literature as a joy.

This lead into this massive coming back of very poor forms of entertainment fiction. From the historical fashion to the criminal or vampire fashion. It is good to remember that when a novel is a work of art always surpasses the gender it is supposed to belong. “Memoires of Adrian” of Marguerite Yourcenar is no more a historical novel but a great novel.

That is the reason I sustain that such thing as the genders doesn’t exist or shouldn’t exist. But this is not the synthesis that is part of the antithesis of avant garde works.

Many young and not so young writers of the XXI Century still think that the worshipping of the market should be their only esthetical position.

Others have completely give up the pursuit of beauty, the formal search which is the reason for literature being an art.

I believe in the ANTITHESIS: The new novel of the XXI century that has to go together with the readers, that means: it has to tell a story but at the same time cannot forget the language search, the innovations that keep novel art alive.

This is why they say about me that I have created the interactive novel also called participated novel.

In this particular kind of novel the author give empty spaces in which the reader can identify their own reality. The reader is co-author of the novel. That is why he can understand so well the mind of a murderer and feel for it, or the mind of a foreigner or the mind of an animal.

This is one of the miracles of any kind of fiction but I intensify this phenomena.

And I try to combine the formal innovations with a story greater than life. The notion of a story itself is to tell things you are used to in a way you never heard of. This is the big deal about storytelling you cannot confine yourself in a gender if you want to achieve the real miracle of it.

I believe the novel of the XXI is one in which the things you don’t write are more important than the things you put in the paper, the real novel is hidden behind your words, the real novel is happening in the mind of the reader. My novels are like icebergs, the part you don’t see is greater than the part that you see and it supports it.

As Albert Camus says a novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

We can forget a good novel but it is any good we will never forget some of the images it brings to us, like reflections of a world that is the best present human being can give to himself: the gift of the art. Because art is the only genuine condition of human being.

This lead me to my personal definition of humans: the human being is the only animal able to write novels.

So let’s free the art of the novel of the wurden of genders. Let art speak for himself.

Freedom is the real literary gender I believe in .

Foto 1: Eugenia Rico with Wole Soyinka

Foto 2: Eugenia Rico with José Saramago.