The question is this: after the first attack of the pandemic, will we fix our eyes on a more intimate, smaller reality, more limited to the immediate? Or will we look for ample spaces to avoid anxiety, restlessness, fear, uncertainty, and the encirclement of threat? What role will fantasy play? And the memory? Does science fiction serve up to now? What will become of the ego syndrome? Each tragedy fosters its bibliography.

Each trauma establishes (almost forces) to test narrative codes that allow us to count better, more closely. The global emergency in the last three months has turned social customs, economic inertias, political plots. In short, it has put in check the suspicion that something will be different, and will affect everything. For example: reality, now stronger, is not always the same as truth.

The very fast overturn of the world requires readjustments in all areas of life . It will be difficult to write again, to count, to narrate, as if nothing had happened. But that, when and how it will be perceived. Stopping the cultural industry dry also requires new strategies. The virus has deposited over time the need to activate emotional and emotional survival formulas. Our obsessions are dangerously focused on cutting spaces: what will become of the future if there is a Covid-19 outbreak, how will we face the questions, what will some answers do, what optimism means now. The first symptom is found in the words.

Literature is always the daughter of its time. It will be very difficult if this situation that we have experienced does not affect you

Pilar Reyes (Penguin Random House)

Publishing companies, monumental or independent, are redesigning their models. And therefore, the coming literature and its access channels will also be codified in another way. There will be less edition of copies, reduction of the catalog of news, tactics of sale and of arrival to the reader different from those of now. Pilar Reyes, one of the most powerful women in the Spanish publishing field from the Pneguin Random House group, affirms that reality permeates everything: « Literature is always the daughter of its time. It will be very difficult if this situation we have experienced does not affect you . We are still trying to understand a situation so strong and so collective that the best literature, at least the one that interests me, will be the one with which we can learn something more about this experience: be it in terms of language, sensitivity or ideas ». And we will not necessarily do it from the precise chronicle of what happened, but interpreting what we are now, and what will come. It will take time, but the literature is about rapid metabolism . The new collective Self has no history yet. Will reality gain more weight ?: “Maybe it's the other way around. The reality has been so emphatic that the literary experience will have to depart from it . Or at least powerfully metamorphose it.

Manhattan recovered by nature in the movie 'I am a legend'.

In this sense, Paca Flores, head of the Periférica publishing house, an example of an independent label that has turned his catalog into a reference for the best search literature, proposes another relationship with reality: «I think that great literature does not copy reality, but that threatens to become reality itself. In this sense, regarding the Periférica catalog, there are some titles by Yuri Herrera ( The Transmigration of Bodies, some tales from Ten Planets ) or Rita Indiana ( La mucama de Omicunlé ) that current reality has just validated. ». The paralysis of the world due to the eruption of the coronavirus has changed perceptions, questions, and fears. "How it will affect literature has not yet been answered. I am very curious.

If literature is also, in some way, the spyglass or microscope of reality, the current historical moment has many common keys from one side of the world to the other. The novelist, poet and physicist Agustín Fernández Mallo, author of Proyecto Nocilla and Trilogía de la guerra , talks about a new creative scenario: «And it is coronavirus. We have no other. Literature will build their stories on that foundation . I suppose that at the beginning they will be stories in a realistic, urgent style, that with data and empirical facts try to open paths in the thicket of a real forest that we do not yet know. But as time passes and we realize that neither utopias nor dystopias exist - in fact, they are only literary sub-genres - fictions will drift towards what we usually call fantastic. That is to say: first it will be realistic and then fiction . In fact, practically all the important texts that have already been published in these two months are essays ”.

Only with distance will we see what impact this disease and this experience will have on society

Carlos Granés

Approximations, hopelessly. Texts written in an urgent streaming on the ground and keeping pace with the speed of events. Almost reflections close to journalistic essayism. The author of Savages of a new era , the Colombian essayist Carlos Granés warns that time is lacking. Time to think: «Only with distance will we see what impact this disease and this experience will have on society. Attempts to interpret the truths hidden behind the pandemic, or to glimpse what world will emerge from it, which have been ventured by public lights such as Zizek, Preciado or Agamben , have been pathetic. Our geniuses have turned out to be quite silly when it comes to analyzing real problems that affect us all . ”

Will reflection on reality gain more weight? Granés bets on that path: «I think so. Science will interest more; sociological and psychological analyzes of what we have experienced, and also serious economic studies. Nobody imagined this medieval future (it is wonderful, within the tragic, that history surprises and unmasks those who try to explain and predict it). There will be more efforts to understand it than to fantasize.

Some screenwriters are already looking for a way to choose from the story barn to be developed that the Covid-19 coven is generating. Javier Gómez Santader, script manager of La casa de papel , the most acclaimed of the Spanish series, positioned on Netflix, does not believe that there will be a great movement of gender balance: "All will be needed because the moment we are going to is very complex. And there realism works and dystopias work. Dystopias are effective when they drink from reality and become metaphors of what is happening. 1984 returns to the best seller lists these days, for example. way, realism and the fantastic always live on the real. If not, there is no basis for emotion, it does not empathize with the character. The imaginary worlds that work do so because they are not foreign, because under all that paraphernalia there is truths you come across when you look inside yourself or when you leave your home portal. "

But the weight of reality is not considered. Whatever it is, it will benefit fiction: "We are going to a world riddled with inequality and complex questions, with ultra movements growing, societies uninformed by hoaxes, tube-fed hatred, rage, poverty and injustice. And we are going, perhaps, to a New balance of power in the world. That, for which we tell stories, is good. Because in a world that rubs, great conflicts take place. Storytellers need characters in conflict. That is why there are so many fictions set in traumatic moments or change of history. It is not for a documentary effort, it is because there is much more narrative material than a customary reality. "

And the theater, where it will look. The playwright and academic Juan Mayorga proposes to look at what is before us: «I can only speak from my own experience. The first text that I have conceived and written in the confinement is a short piece entitled Noli me tangere , based on the evangelical episode and the pictorial motif inspired by it. I had never thought or seen it as I see it now. Which makes me think that this great crisis is leading, rather than great fantasies, to re-focus on what was always there and that, being amazing, our attention was despised ».

Perhaps because so many times life becomes better in the small. Let's see.

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