"The Fools Have Won the Battle"

"I am another," said Rimbaud. Juan José Millás (Valencia, 1946) claims that our self is not ours, and we will never know how many selves we have. He reiterates this in 'This Fool is Going to Write a Novel' (Alfaguara). A pure Millás reflects on the craft of writing and living. He is the author, narrator, protagonist, and counter-character. Paradoxical and unsettling as always, he narrates the challenge of a certain Millás facing his last report.

Many. One of the mysteries of biology is that despite changing so much throughout life, we change so little. All our cells are new, and yet the self remains. How is it possible that, having nothing to do with the seven-year-old child I was, I remember him as something of my own? I keep wondering who that child was, that self. And it is a mystery.

The current one. The one most in control of his self and actions. The others were more a product of their circumstances, with little capacity for action. At this stage of life, you understand that everything is a product of chance. We live with the illusion that planning works. And it doesn't.

Absolutely. I think of the trillions of things that had to coincide for you to meet the mother of your children. The most important things are the most random. Seen honestly, we are a ship adrift. And yet now I feel like a self constructed by me more than before.

Yes. I feel I have been in the hands of a self with which I did not agree. A mistaken self has been my owner.

It is very clear that it is others who think for us. More than speaking, we are spoken. The exercise of thinking for oneself is exhausting. But it is the writer's job: to break the established circuits through which language flows. Not to be written or spoken, but to write and speak.

Thus it is. To a large extent, it is a product of linguistic programming. Your self is not yours. It is a certainty.

I propose a class struggle that has nothing to do with economics between the high essayistic intelligence and the proletarian novelistic class. I experienced it when I was starting, and experimentalism was in vogue. Juan Benet, or someone of his ilk, said that reading novels after the age of 40 was immature. Here emerges this struggle between those who say novels with plots are rubbish, those who metaphorize intelligence, and the others. Who runs the world? Who are the intelligent and the fools? Are novelists an inferior category?

I'm afraid so. That the fools have won the battle.

It can be developed. It is surprising that we qualify dreams as unreal, as if they were not part of reality, like fiction, which is part and shapes reality. We are children of the tale. Nothing will become real if it has not first passed through someone's mind.

Let's call it conflict. It is written from there. Without conflict, there is no literature. Without it, you can write the Penal Code, but not 'Madame Bovary'. From well-being, neither writing nor being is possible.

Life is, indeed, very strange. But as an epitaph, I have chosen another: 'That was all'. If you do not suffer a certain estrangement from life, I insist, you cannot write. I write to cure myself of the estrangement I have suffered since childhood.

Less and less. It is beginning to have a certain appeal. It is like surgical anesthesia. You disappear. The return from sedation fascinates me. You literally cease to be. What a wonder! Being is exhausting.

Let's not be so defeatist. But, indeed, everything is very improvable. We lived through more splendid times from the Transition until the 2008 crisis, especially in journalism.

Journalism almost everything. Novels are not usually commissioned. That's why writing them is a task for heroes. You get up and start digging. You dislike what you wrote yesterday and must rewrite it. You find amazing excuses not to do it: I have a headache; I have to go to the tax office; there's nothing in the fridge... Writing novels is a task of discipline for two, three, or four years. Writing is digging. It leaves you more exhausted than digging a trench. And on top of that, the novel can rot.

Fortunately, none, but I know many cases. Most novels do not return even 10% of the effort put into them.

It remains a mystery. But I would say it serves to calm the nerves.

A fortune.

Yes. It has been one of the most sensible things I have done in life. And yet, deep down, you end up talking to yourself.

If we follow the guidelines, my adjective would be "millasiano". But I don't care. Posterity doesn't matter to me. It would be interesting to find out when posterity disappeared, which is something from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The mix doesn't seem bad to me. I like being a hybrid between Houdini and Kafka. Each has much of the other.

According to Juan Luis Arsuaga's biological calculation, I have life left for two or three more. And for a definitive report that would satisfy me and in which the Millás of the novel fails.