The Barcelona of dreams, according to Javier Calvo

Perhaps no city like Barcelona has undergone such a blatant process of erection of an exoticized and touristized novelistic version of itself. The Barcelona of novels such as The Shadow of the Wind or The Cathedral of the Sea is not a simple consequence of the institutional transformation of Barcelona into a theme park for tourists to enjoy: it is its literary arm. Features that hysterically highlights this subgenre that we can call the Barcelona tourist novel : mystery, romanticism, conspiracies, legendary crimes, passions broken by history, stone architecture, gas light, old bookstores. Features that hides: the present, current social and identity conflicts and everything that suggests that Barcelona is not a charming maze of narrow streets impregnated with history and enigmas .

It is sad that the shadow of the wind is the most read novel about Barcelona in history . Even so, his clumsy mammoth footsteps have not been able to crush a local literary tradition immune to the stinking suckers of History (or even reinforced by them). The Tradition of the Barcelona Novel, with capital letters, opens with private life , has its pinnacle in the late afternoons with Teresa , acquires epic proportions with the city of wonders and becomes baroque with the day of Watusi . It is a satirical, picaresque tradition, centered on the ins and outs of the Barcelona class system, on the conflicts between the bourgeois posh and the outsider, between the center and the periphery. It is not the only tradition, nor does it necessarily represent the most important books, but it does have some central tradition: it gives the feeling that giants of the novel like Oller, Sales or Rodoreda could have been born anywhere. In contrast, the Marsé and company are an inseparable phenomenon of the city. Barcelona is its theme and its central character.

All artistic creation is a matter of affiliation. You choose the tradition to which you want to belong. In the case of Barcelona, ​​which is mine, the choice of artistic ancestors has implications at the tip of the blade. Political, language, class, history reading and aesthetic implications, apart, of course, from the sometimes complicated task of avoiding the mammoth of tourist psychogeography. Literary cities have connotations that can sometimes become prisons (see the cycle of cities attributed to a literary patron saint that the CCCB organized in the past decade). In my case, choosing a triumvirate from Barcelona artists in whose wake I could write about my city (Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Joan Perucho and Joan Ponç) was guided by a criterion of seeking a negative of the institutional and literary representations of my city, that excludes things like the tourist guide romanticism, the non-conflictive mythology of the Civil War or the different projections of literary marketing about the city (the Gauche Divine, the Barcelona del Boom, etc).

There is something in the work of my three Barcelona artistic sponsors that owes much to its historical moment, the Barcelona of the 50s. Gray and gloomy city, stabbed by cultural repression , however it is the cradle of that explosive second artistic avant-garde marked by Dau al Set, abstraction or Brossa. It is also an era of underground artists and writers, marked by censorship or self-censorship, that would not come to light until decades later. True: the most striking a priori feature of Cirlot, Perucho and Ponç is escapism. A rabid denial of reality, which translates into poetics marked by scholarship and that emergence of imagination bound by the historical situation, although not necessarily related to each other. Cirlot flees to an aesthetic of death and non-being, mystical and esoteric, of underground cities and prophetic dreams. Perucho builds brightly fabulous geographies and architectures, populated by soldier-scholars composed of parts of a multitude of historical and literary characters. Ponç flees at night and a demonic aesthetic, where the dreams and archetypes of the Id build a superior reality.

But despite this apparent escape, Barcelona is present in the work of these authors . A trace in the unconscious, a degenerate and sometimes monstrous environment. A gallery of ghosts in Perucho. A nightmare for Ponç. A city always nocturnal, interior, through which Cirlot walks only when everyone sleeps, as in his ritual walks through Vallcarca, superimposing the city of his fears and his illusions to the streets and architecture. In this inner Barcelona, ​​lighting is possible, but only fleeing to the realm of the imagination and the reconstructed past. After their deaths, oblivion has accompanied the figures of Cirlot, Perucho and Ponç to a greater or lesser degree, which in my opinion makes them more attractive. Can an analogy be established between your nightmare Barcelona and our Nightmare Barcelona? I am not sure, but I do see echoes of his fabulous works in such diverse authors as Victoria Cirlot, Xavier Theros, Julià Guillamon, Gerard Horta, Víctor Nubla or Sebastià Jovani. The tradition of the Barcelona of Dreams .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• culture
• Barcelona
• tourism
• literature
• novel

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