Jorge Ranz Clemente (12266299)

Prof. dr. E. (Esther) Peeren

Objects of Cultural Analysis
13 October 2018

The function of reality and fiction in Enrique Vila-Matas’ ‘Chet Baker piensa en
su arte’

For the final paper, I have chosen Enrique Vila-Matas’ ‘Chet Baker piensa en su arte’, a
text which gives its name to the author’s personal anthology, published in 2011. In this
text, halfway between the short story and the novel, between fiction and essay, the
narrator, a literary critic, locks himself up in a hotel room in Turin during a night, with
the aim of both theorizing and creating a new literary genre that he will call “Critical
Fiction” (Ficción Crítica). What the narrator pursued with this new genre is to mix the
narratives of Georges Simenon and James Joyce. This mixture is seen as the
reconciliation, in the same writing, of two worlds: one, inhabited by writers such as Joyce,
Kafka, Beckett, Banville…who perceive literature as something unconventional,
experimental, irrational, with which they want to give voice in their texts to the existence
in its pure disordered and non-connected form; the other, with writers like Simenon,
García Marquez, Greene… who aim to give some sense to the ungraspable flow of the
events by a discursive and more traditional literature.

There are three main reasons why I chose this text as my object. The first two reasons
could be summarized by saying that the text occupies, for me, a double strategical
position: one, in order to approach the oeuvre of the author and, the other, to grasp the
role fiction and literature plays nowadays in the European context, since this text could
be seen, not just as the consummation or the maturity of all the themes, issues, strategies
and styles of the author’s work, but also as a statement of intents for the future of narrative
in general. In the text, the narrator is presented as a witness of the crisis of narrative
provoked by modern literature, which has distorted traditional forms of representation.
We can become aware of it, not only by focusing on the main themes of the text (such as
nonsense, eccentricity, humor, the ruins of the moral landscape, etc.), but also by looking
at its very form, which also gives an account of the crisis of traditional ways of narration
(strategies such as hyper-reflexivity, closeness and repulsion to theory, the mixture of
genres, etc.). It is because of these issues that I think this text also plays a strategic role
in order to research or to grasp the questions our contemporaneity arises in the arena of
fiction and literature.

However, apart from this double privileged position (within the work of the author and
recent European literary history), there is a third reason to choose this text which also can
provide a direction to take my analysis of the object. Within the text, there is a line, a
strand or a tension between the concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ that I would like to close
read. This couple of terms is enough interesting by itself, if taken from the point of view
of literary studies or even philosophy, but, if we move from those fields to the ground of
social or political relations, this pair takes another form. In other words, if we take into
account events such as the proliferation of fake news, the dominance and uses of post-
truth, the growing of total distrust of our political institutions, etc., that carry within
themselves the blurring of a clear and resistant line between reality and fiction, then, the
pair of concepts mentioned above reaches an impact that would be worth exploring in a
text that addresses the crisis of narrative. This tension, disseminated along the text, at
least in a first reading, raises questions such as: what is the function of this tension in the
text? What is it trying to evoke (or what does in fact evoke) with it in the readers? How
does the blur of this distinction affect our experience of reading in general? Are there any
other concepts at stake in this dichotomy (for example, ‘legible’ and ‘illegible’)?

Hence, I would like to close read some relevant passages of this text taking the tension
between reality and fiction as the direction of my analysis, although I am still struggling
with the theoretical framework I am going to call into dialogue.

References:

Bergonzoni, Gisela. “Vila-Matas pense à son art : entre l’âme et la bête, entre la critique
et le récit”. Parisot, Yolaine, et Charline Pluvinet. Pour un récit transnational :
La fiction au défi de l'histoire immédiate. Rennes: Presses universitaires de
Rennes, 235-248, 2015. Web. http://books.openedition.org/pur/52578.

Bergonzoni, Gisela. "Enrique Vila-Matas, entre legível e ilegível: uma poética em forma
de ficção." Remate de Males, 37.2 (2017): 597-612, 2018.
Pellejero, Eduardo. “Pensar a la intemperie: la crítica expuesta al riesgo de la
experimentación.” Fractal: Revista de Psicologia, 26(spe), 509-522, 2014. Web.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1984-0292/1326

Pache Carballo, Laura. “Narrativa voluble de la antología Recuerdos inventados y Chet

Baker piensa en su arte de Enrique Vila-Matas.” Cuadernos de Aleph, 10, 60-78,
2018.

Quintana Tejera, Luis María. “El cuento en la frontera de lo insólito: Enrique Vila-
Matas”. Culturales, 2(2), 109-128, 2014. Web.
http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1870-
11912014000200005&lng=es&tlng=es.

Vila-Matas, Enrique. ‘Chet Baker piensa en su arte: ficción crítica’. In: Chet Baker piensa
en su arte. Barcelona: Debolsillo, 245-345, 2011.