"Cervantes would never have won the Cervantes Prize"

Javier Cercas, much like Don Quixote unraveling wrongs, dismantled modern literary misunderstandings in his induction speech at the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). The writer from Cáceres (Ibahernando, 1962) read 'Misunderstandings of Modernity' before his colleagues at the esteemed institution this Sunday. He subtitled his extensive and critical address as 'A Manifesto', in which he debunked clichés such as the uselessness of art, the sanctification of the writer, their isolation in an ivory tower, the systematic condemnation of popular literature as bad, and the consecration of minority literature as good.

Days ago, fellow academic and recent Cervantes Prize winner Álvaro Pombo remarked at the same RAE that the author of 'Don Quixote' was "a brilliant 'loser' who never won anything". His colleague Cercas, a likely future Cervantes Prize winner, evoked the father of the novel to assert that "he would never have won the Cervantes Prize".

Cercas believes that in literature "we struggle in a persistent web of misunderstandings, not to mention superstitions, prejudices, half-truths, or simple lies, which distort reality and prevent us from seeing it clearly." He stated this under the portrait of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, in the auditorium of the noble academic mansion where Cercas, donned in the requisite morning coat, was introduced by Asunción Gómez-Pérez and Pedro Cátedra. His candidacy was supported by academic Clara Sánchez - who delivered the 'laudatio' this Sunday - Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa - who did not attend - and Pedro Álvarez de Miranda.

"Writing truthfully means writing against the cliché," asserted the new holder of chair R at the start of an extensive address - 70 pages - in which he reviewed his life and literary ambitions, citing a plethora of narrators, poets, and thinkers: Homer, Ovid, Tirso de Molina, Lichtemberg, Sterne, Kant, Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, De Vigny, Leopardi, Wilde, Flaubert, Valéry, Henry James, Conrad, Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Sartre, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nabokov, Borges, Octavio Paz, Bernhard, Brodsky, Kundera, or Heidegger, peppered his speech. And certainly Shakespeare, Cervantes, and their universal Don Quixote and Sancho "two hopeless madmen".

True literature is made "with rebellious words," according to Cercas. Hence, "it represents a danger to any power." Since "it only wants submissive citizens, people who say Yes, it will always aspire to control it, to subdue it, to domesticate it." "If it depended on it, don't doubt it: it would ban it immediately," he said. "Is there anything more useful than that?" Cercas asked to vindicate the utility of literature.

For the author of 'Soldiers of Salamis' or 'The Impostor', someone with a good novel in their hands "is a public danger, a walking time bomb, a potential independent thinker, a germinal insubordinate." Citizens "capable of saying No - like Camus's rebel man or Ibsen's enemy of the people - when everyone around them says Yes, as Alonso Quijano and Emma Bovary do, are for Cercas "two ideal readers".

He dismantled the cliché that "a successful novel is by definition bad," which would mean "an artistic defeat for 'Don Quixote' and Shakespeare's dramas, also very popular in Elizabethan England." "Neither Cervantes nor Shakespeare were prestigious writers in their time: we all know that Cervantes would never have won the Cervantes Prize, or not without scandal from the critics, and that in his time Shakespeare was barely considered literature," Cercas ventured.

"The proof is that their works were not published seriously before their deaths; but today no one doubts the place that both Cervantes and Shakespeare occupy at the top of the Western canon," added the author of 'Anatomy of a Moment'. "I am not in favor of popular literature; I am in favor of the popularity of literature," he clarified.

For Cercas, "the only infallible literary critic is time." He knows that an author should not desperately seek the favor of the public "because a true writer only writes what they have in their guts, what they have no choice but to write."

"Today as always, a true writer can be anything but an idiot," he said, clarifying that idiot comes from the Greek 'idiotes', meaning a person who only takes care of their own affairs and disregards the common, that is, the public, that is, politics."

"For a writer, true immortality is anonymity," Cercas asserted, dispelling the misunderstanding "that holds that the protagonist of literature is the author." Granting "excessive prominence to the author," sometimes "even setting them apart from the rest of mortals, sanctifying them and turning them into a semi-divine figure" is, for him, a "ridiculous" glorification.

For Cercas, a novel "is a score that each reader interprets in their own way, and therein lies the enchantment of literature." "The misunderstanding lies in believing that the protagonist of literature is the author; false: the protagonist of literature is the reader, who is the one who finishes the books. A book without readers is dead letter," he proposed. "A book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, he cannot expect to see a prophet," as Lichtemberg summarized in a single aphorism.

He never thought, Cercas said, of becoming an academic, but now he is fully entitled as the holder of chair R, vacant after the death in September 2022 of Javier Marías, to whom he dedicated a warm tribute. He remembered him with cordiality, affection, and respect as "one of the great Spanish novelists of the last century, perhaps one of the great Spanish novelists, period." Also as a "combative man," as Marías himself defined.