From Bomb an interview with the exceptional Vila-Matas:
Lina Meruane Do you have the reader in mind when you write?
Enrique Vila-Matas Never. I think of myself as the reader. It isn’t selfish, though; it’s about needing to like what I’m doing.
LM The idea of the journey is at the core of your books: a writer travels and narrates his displacement. Looking back, how did the journey begin for you? How did your point of view find its place in Paris, New York, Dublin, those places you’ve traveled to that have become the settings for your work?
EVM I always feel that I belong to the place where I am.
LM When in Paris, you’re Parisian, when in New York, you’re a New Yorker?
EVM Yes, you could say that. That explains why Rodrigo Fresán said that I was the most Argentine of Spanish authors. Though in Portugal someone else said that I am the most Portuguese of Spanish writers. That also explains why I’m not even remotely a nationalist. I belong to the place where I am going. And my journeys, they are mental. All my novels are journeys of the imagination, and nothing more.
LM Are the journeys associated with the books from these places or with the writers who were there before you? Are they included in this journey of the imagination?
EVM Writing about a place or about a subject allows me to read about it and research it in tandem. Dublinesque, for example. While I was writing the novel, I did research on Irish culture and Dublin, about which I knew nothing at all. And to write Doctor Pasavento, I forced my dear friend Andre Gabastou, my French translator, to drive me around Montaigne’s castle because that’s where the essay and the modern idea of selfhood were invented and I wanted to write about the creation and later disappearance of the subject in the West. So I went to Montaigne’s castle to begin these reflections and, while at it, start writing. I could have read Montaigne and not bothered with writing a novel. Instead, in order to read Montaigne, I began writing a book dealing with the issues he had raised. Perhaps it’s a little odd.
LM As a method it’s undoubtedly odd, but one writes not only as a result of experience, one also writes from books. Reading becomes part of a person’s biography.
EVM Dublinesque allowed me not only to travel—I went to Dublin 14 times in a very short period—but also to get involved in something that is fascinating and limitless: Irish culture. I just discovered the author of a book about the Aran Islands, John M. Synge. This man went to Aran following the advice of the poet Yeats, who told him, “They only speak Gaelic on these islands. Do an anthropological piece on the people who live there.” But this man listened to the conversations in Gaelic and couldn’t understand a word, so he made them up. He spied on the people talking down below from a hole in the second floor of the inn where he lived. He really thought they were saying what he thought he heard. And he wrote down what he imagined he heard. Later Synge wrote the plays that were staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for 40 years. There were many vagabonds, many wandering characters, and people lost on the islands in them. Beckett comes out of what he saw at the Abbey Theatre.
LM Didn’t you have a similar experience at Documenta 13 recently? You were exposed to languages you didn’t understand but suddenly imagined that you could decipher?
EVM Yes, Chinese and German. I’m studying Synge because I’m writing about my experience this summer in Kassel. It’s going to deal with the absurd situation of being in a Chinese restaurant, where I heard German and Chinese all the time and was visited by people coming to tell me stories. When I told an Irish friend who lives in Barcelona that I was writing about this—whose name, John William Wilkinson, sounds made up, though it’s real—he told me it reminded him of what a classic Irish writer had done, this Synge guy.
LM I would like to know more about your reading system: Going back to your childhood, did you always first want to write and then to read?
EVM I can’t go back too far because, like Perec, I don’t have childhood memories. The other day, I asked my sisters if they remembered anything that happened to me as a child. I had been commissioned to write a text about my childhood and I didn’t know what to write; I put the story together entirely from borrowed memories.
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