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| SUSANA MEDINA: The multidirectional coherence | Spanish |
Susana Medina is a writer. Born in Hampshire (United Kingdom), from a Spanish father and a German mother of Czech origin, she grew up in Valencia and since 1989 she’s been living in London, a city that has inspired, nurtured and developed the majority of her literary work. With a body of work that is tremendously restless, that ploughs with no contemplations through the frontiers between genres and styles, with an insatiable curiosity, an omnipresent lucidity and an overwhelming honesty, Susana defines her literary work with a powerful asseveration that presides over the homepage of her website: “Often coherence is mistaken with homogeneity. To be coherent, art should be shooting in all directions.” Susana Medina has written and published poetry, novels, short stories, essays and cinematographic screenplays. She has been given innumerable awards amongst which the international prize for short stories Max Aub takes prominence. A PHD thesis about Jorge Luis Borges, that has become the book “BorgesLand” and the re-edition of “Philosophical Toys”-her first novel in English about the special relationship of Medina and Buñuel with the objects- have the author subsumed in a phase of intellectual hyperactivity from which, in spite of everything, she wanted to come out and concede us this extensive and generous interview, part of which is published below.
In the poem Return to Iceland from your book “Souvenirs of the Accident” (2004) you give us a glimpse of a relationship with the author which is especially intimate with whom, in a way, you have shared the last years of your life during the elaboration of your PHD thesis: Jorge Luis Borges.
In a poem Borges says: “I did not know how to be happy”. Borges is referring to his life, concretely to his emotional life. His emotional life was disastrous. For me this was a very early choice. Let’s say, well, on the one hand you have the writing and on the other there is also life. And I want to live. However, the same life that has moved me somehow to reconcile with that imaginary world in which Borges used to take refuge, an imaginary world that transcends and at the same time transforms reality. “Blindness is not murkiness but another form of solitude” Borges used to say. I believe that Borges, whose body of work effectively I have shared for a few years of my life, did not find happiness in his relationships with other people even though he found absolute literary happiness. These types of happiness exist. It is something very personal that I guess I wrote about when I went completely deaf after an illness that lasted three years during which I did not know what would happen. From all that arises the poem “Return to Iceland”.
Going back to “Souvenirs of the Accident”, in the poem number 66, a lurid poem that transports us to that almost historic rancid atmosphere of Franco’s Spain, you speak of a Spanish Lolita that commits suicide. Surrender?
Lolita commits suicide, yes. Here we are entering the topic of what “politically correct” is. From a “politically correct” and feminist point of view, Lolita is a woman mistreated by her circumstances who has been sufficiently strong to survive. But life is like this. Suddenly someone cannot take it anymore and commits suicide. Is this politically correct? The point is that it happens.
Occasionally you have made references about writing as energy, like a beat, like a rebellion. What do you mean by all that?
It is not necessarily a rebellion in the political sense. Often a work of art produces an effect that has to do with magic, with something that communicates forms that are totally conscious. Like music does in a way, how do you translate music? Is it not possible then to say, for example, this music is sociological? That’s why I speak of writing as a beat, I am saying that there are things that produce a pleasure that is almost of physical nature and it is an aesthetic pleasure that has to do with sounds, with images, with how the work flows. I believe that energy in itself can be rebellion in the sense in which there are types of energy that promote themselves. For example, formal experiments. When I was reading authors I never ask myself whether they sold well or not. Borges in his day did not sell much and later there was a whole industry built around Borges. These are the paradoxes of the market. All of these becomes an echo of the brutal mercantile system.
Does this “brutal system” of the market that you talk about evolve positively or negatively these days?
It is a complex subject. With the apparition of the Internet I am truly enthused. Because people can put on there whatever they want so it creates a hierarchy that is very different to the one created by mass media or the great publishing groups.
So, do you feel comfortable on “the net”?
Yes, absolutely. What’s most interesting to me is that with the Internet people have access to your work immediately; they do not have to buy your book. Besides, I can make my work available in English or in Spanish. If I publish in England I cannot do it in Spanish, if I publish in Spain I cannot do it in English. It’s a whole world that in a conventional publication would not fit. In my opinion, digital technology can help artistic independence because it makes production cheaper and more flexible. In this same line of thought I am thinking about re-publishing “Red Stories” as a digital impression.
The issue of languages appears often in conferences and interviews of Susana Medina.
For me it has been problematic, the fact of having written for such a long time in Spanish whilst living in England because a lot of people that I knew quite simply could not read my stuff. During a time, Spanish people that I knew did not read that much. And many English people around me did read but could not understand me. Now that has changed. Starting to write in English has meant that I have made contact with a whole series of people that are there and can read me in English.
You could say that transgression is very present in your work. How has your literary trajectory evolved around this concept?
Well, I started in a very transgressional manner because what interested me was a whole list of things that you do not say, that you cannot do, that do not happen for economic reasons. Above all, I was interested in how you say things. Why can you not do it this way, Why can I not experiment on a formal level if I want to? That period is in “Pieces of One”, “Red Stories”, “Souvenirs of the Accident” and “Philosophical Toys” and it is a way of saying what you are not supposed to.
Let’s talk about your latest projects. “Slumberville” is a novel that you have been writing for a while and it looks like you want to continue with it.
Slumberville is about dreams; in fact it is the literal translation of what “the life of dreams” would be. I have transformed them into a kind of town or geographical area. I am very interested in dreams because they could even threaten your daily integrity. Curiously, Slumberville is written in Spanish even though the title is in English and it is not finished. I spent many years changing it, introducing modifications and I love it very much because it has very funny parts, very strange parts that I would like to rescue.
All this content about dreams in a way connects us with surrealism and Buñuel surrealism, another one of your artistic referents.
The surrealist movement is a circumscribed movement of a determined period that does not have a monopoly of the dreamlike or irrational reality, which has always existed before and after surrealism. What interests me about Buñuel is that he explored a number of things that are not usually explored. I have worked on the examples of Buñuel fetishism. “Philosophical Toys” has in a way a kind of relation to all this. It is about our strange relationship with objects. We like them but at the same time we are critical of them. Humans create objects, which is why they often have a strong human component. For example this clock (points to an old clock inside a box with two half-open doors that is in a piece of furniture nearby where we are talking), this clock is trapped in a box as if it was about to come out but it doesn’t because it is trapped. This is just a moment because a moment later it could come out…it’s like an egg that’s appearing (…) My generation has a huge weakness for toys, for small things. I have many friends that buy toys straight and they are forty years old. This generates in me an ambivalent reaction: On the one hand I think that it is positive to keep your infancy within you and not to become a person that is too serious which I think would be sad… I believe that it is important to keep a relationship with one’s silliness, with childhood, with purity. On the other hand, consumerism exploits this weakness. You could think that being infantile is “anti-establishment” but at the same time let’s say that it encourages a sort of childlike mentality. Summing up, you think that you have made a decision freely, that you want to be infantile so a part of you does not die but the sellers have decided that they will promote products more accurately because thanks to you and others that have made the “anti-establishment” decision a certain product sells…(laughs).
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