I have repeatedly declared that some cities are literary and others simply are not. There are times when it depends on the determination of one writer, or group of writers, and other times on the city's reality, on the syntax of its memory or appearance, on its archaeology, on its people. In the 19th century, Barcelona suddenly becomes literary, a city capable of being imagined and of generating a three-pronged Barcelona imagery: as the widowed and romantic capital of a lost empire, it generated a posy of nationalistic odes: as the captain city for an industrial revolution, social struggles and wonders for the rich, it sublimated a novelistic style tightly linked to social contradictions and initiated by Narcís Oller in his La febre d'or: finally, as a sinning, baleful, port city that, after Altadill's Barcelona y sus misterios was left in waiting to be coded by French novelists: Carcó, Bourget, Pieyre de Mandiargues, Genet. It is particularly interesting to walk today through the remains of Mandiargues and Genet's Barcelona. The city with groins of the so-called Barrio Chino where not one single Chinese person lived until the 20th century's decade of the 1970s. Few cities have literary mirrors as complete as Sagarra's Vida privada, north-south journey, from the bourgeoisie to the lumpenproletariat. Few cities have been able to pose for a masterpiece such as Mandiargues La Marge; or had one of its quarters -el Chino- baptized by Carcó; or lived so wretchedly as thief and homosexual by San Genet in his Le journal d'un voleur, a memoir of the marginal Barcelona, of the Barcelona of the Parallel. As important appendixes of its life, Barcelona, the rearguard Republican capital, posed for Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, for Malraux in L'Espoir and for Claude Simon in a novel he named after a hotel, Le Palace, and which probably awarded him the Nobel Prize. The city also serves as a model for other passing novelists: Thomas Mann, Max Frish, Soldati, all of them enjoying the double-fronted city, Gaudí's Ensanche and the bourgeoisie and the Barrio Chino, or the port of the sans coulotte. Following the Civil War that hybrid, republican Barcelona remained hidden in the memories of the defeated. Until they began to recover Barcelona's imagery from exile following Mercé Rodoreda's masterful melancholy in La plaça del Diamant. Or those other writers who, in the tough postwar period, bet on the reconstruction of democratic and urban reason. There are the novels written from Aribau Street's breathable pessimism such as Carmen Laforet's Nada or neo-realism's first steps in Juan Goytisolo's Para vivir aquí or in José Antonio de la Loma's La calle sin sol, Antonio Rabinad's Los contactos furtivos, set in today's Olympic area, which once was dark and depressed, or in Candel's savage portrait of urban growth through the floods of internal migration in Donde la ciudad pierde su nombre. The stages for that social and architectonic defeat are still visible today in the ugly Barcelona of the outskirts, or in what remains of La Barceloneta, or in the now almost deconstructed Barrio Chino. It was from one of the ventricles of the Chino, Escudillers street, that Pieyre de Mandiargues started writing La Marge at the beginning of the 1960s, a portrait at the same time of the character's crisis and of the city's critical renaissance under the Franco regime. Fifty years of urban novel contemplate us, and from them rises a possible catalogue of the postwar period's literary imagery: Els platans de Barcelona by Víctor Mora, Recuento by Luis Goytisolo, almost all of Joan Marsé's novels set somewhere between Guinardó's quarter and eternity, Eduardo Mendoza's La ciudad de los prodigios, Montserrat Roig's El temps de les cireres, Juan Miñana's La claque, José Antonio Garriga Vela's Muntaner, 38, my own cycle on Pepe Carvalho and my novel El pianista too, through which I tried to historicize myself, my neighborhood and its people. I don't want to be a cataloguer of the whole, but there is the poetry too, through which Joaquín Marco, Jaime Gil de Biedma, José Agustín Goytisolo, Gabriel Ferrater unveiled neighborhoods, amphitheaters, dens in a city full of groins, armpits and knee backs.
MÁS INFORMACIÓN
Barcelona's exciting literary experience stems from a space-time relation. This city has materialized the best of its past, making of Barcelona an imaginary space full of barricades, absinthe whores, Gaudís, ethical sufferings, flippant rich persons, solid poor ones, occupants, occupied, humiliated persons and offended ones too. It is a setting full of small, close-up wonders, just twenty minutes away from Robadors Street's absinthe whores are the Els Jardinets' gentlemen of the Paseo de Gràcia. All of it lived in 150 years of history, years which had a bit of everything and during which everything happened on working days and, on Sundays, we all headed to Las Ramblas to pose for Georges Sand or Theophile Gautier throughout the long 19th century or for television channels avid for Olympic moments in the, according to Hobsbawm, extremely brief 20th century. There is still something left of that city, which was once literary and now is only postmodern.
* Este artículo apareció en la edición impresa del Viernes, 15 de marzo de 2002