Ferlosio: & quot; I am in favor of censorship & quot;

It is known that Ferlosio chose the term wrecks ("piece or fragment of the ship that has been shipwrecked", according to the RAE) to designate his brief writings. It is often confused with aphorisms, and in fact some wrecks are, but others have rather the character of apologists, parables, sentences or even short stories. Those who approached the joke tried to eliminate them in the successive reissues of his books.

But in addition to the wrecks he wrote as such there are also those that, by way of quotations, can be taken from his writings and, in addition, those of an oral nature , which were dispersed in the middle of a hundred dialogues and interviews that (with many resistances) granted throughout his life and I have been fortunate to be able to collect in a recent volume ( Dialogues with Ferlosio ). The examples of these oral wrecks are quite varied and juicy:

- «It seems to me that memory is nothing more than revenge».

- «I do not serve for interviews. I can not answer fast. I am fundamentally the enemy of spontaneity ».

- «I'm not interested in intimate topics. (...) I read the newspapers because my interest is totally focused on the public. That is why I regret the invasion of the press by the private ».

- «I am in favor of censorship. Censorship against telebasura programs and against advertising aimed at children » .

- «Lope de Vega was a bungler, a mamarracho and a scoundrel».

- «Cela made many books, but always repeating the same. The voice is recognized to the leagues, always with the same monserga. He is a man who everything debases. He was the one who wrote the first review about the Alfanhui and launched it. Then I was ungrateful to Cela, but it was a bully.

- «We always forgive the interviewer for the nonsense he asks us. We never forgive the bullshit that we answer ».

Like the rest of the oral sources, these texts pose many problems but also offer some lessons. The problems derive from the difference between what was said and what was written. It is clear that our ways of speaking and writing are not the same, and although it is common for a person to speak and write well (or badly), there are quite a few cases of great writers who are bad speakers and people who are happy to hear but who are unable to write a readable paragraph. In fact it is known that the anatomical bases of oral and written expression are located in different brain areas, they are different linguistic functions. And that difference is also reflected in the different value of one thing and another: we cannot attribute the same solvency to a phrase thought, written, revised and published by its author and to another one that a journalist noted that he had heard him improvise in response to a unexpected question.

But in the case of Ferlosio the testimony of his closest friends (who was preparing for interviews trying to guess the questions they could ask him and the answers he should give them), the coherence between his writings and his statements, as well as the frequent reiteration of very similar answers to similar questions, they indicate that also their oral testimonies were very well thought out and that, even with the rhythm that a conversation imposes, they knew how to manage their allergy to spontaneity and improvisation to always maintain the coherence and rigor of their thought.

These are the reasons why a large sample of dialogues with Ferlosio allows us to know his ideas better, clarifying questions that he would not have written if they had not been raised and summarizing his reflections in shorter and simpler terms than usual in his writing, but without falling into inaccuracy or lack of rigor that he feared so much, so he used to polish his drafts again and again, many times to end up deciding that they did not deserve to be published.

A field in which the contribution of its oral wrecks is very clear is the autobiographical one (since at the time of writing it was especially reluctant to personal confessions):

- «My daughter and I had a great time. I was like this all disastrous, like a wanderer. In the Retreat we separated and then we were among the trees and I gave him candy. The ladies thought strange things and called the police. We had a lot of fun ».

- «I don't feel any aggressiveness in Madrid nor have I ever done weekends because I have never worked».

- «With little knowledge I have made it seem that I am more educated than I really am. I have very few readings. »

- «Me, I am almost old by birth, you know?» .

- «The intellectual word is too respectable for me. Deep down I don't feel more than a gossip, a pelagatos, a thrown uncle that you can't count on at all.

- «I don't like to exaggerate».

Another point that illuminate your verbal statements, when you consider the date you made them, is, of course, the change in tastes. It is well known that for many years he used to say nothing more about El Jarama than the phrase he made famous: "I have hated him." But in 1957, a year after the novel was published, it was much more explicit: «In El Jarama it seems to me that there is, if there is something new, a scruple of mutual fidelity and correspondence between all the elements that make up the novelistic world. There may be a background in all Spanish literature, from classical realism to Carlos Arniches; and abroad, as some critics have already pointed out. The hive , in this sense, has to do with the novel that has introduced the behaviorist structure in Spain. There may be El Jarama related to her ».

That change of tastes also appears, of course, when asked about the novelists he prefers. In 1957 he replied: «A European: Conrad; and an American: John Dos Passos ». In 1986, however, he says: «The novels bore me, especially those of family gossip. Actually, after Kafka nothing good came out again »

And in a matter of cinematic tastes it is no less blunt: «Charlot killed the cinema. Modern times and The Gold Rush are so good that they finished everything ».

Some people prefer not to know personally the writers they admire. There are also many literature theorists according to which a text should be read regardless of any biographical or psychological data of its author. Others think that the private life of a writer - and even the intimate one -, to the extent that it is possible and lawful to know her, decisively enriches the possibilities of interpreting her literature. In the latter case, oral sources, such as epistolary or archival sources, are, with all their problems, a great help for literary hermeneutics. One of the most respectful people I know with the private life of others confesses at the same time that I would give a year of life in exchange for a long conversation with Aristotle.

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