“It is since Cervantes and thanks to him that genres have mixed to the point of promiscuity. They have ceased to be watertight compartments and I love that,” said Gonzalo Celorio, the latest Cervantes Prize winner, a writer of multiple genres, but also an editor, professor, critic, bibliophile, and factotum of books: his favorite word is “word.”
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Celorio (Mexico City, 78 years old) entered with a cane and the face of a good person, a white mustache and clear eyes, with a voice “somewhat diminished,” he said. He was accompanied by the director of the Reina Sofía Museum, Manuel Segade (“This is an invitation to dialogue between word and image,” he explained when presenting), and María José Gálvez, general director of Books, Comics and Reading, who remembered the recently deceased Beatriz de Moura, editor of Tusquets. This was the publisher of the award winner since his first novel, Amor propio, published in 1992. “De Moura opened Spanish literature to the world and opened the world to Spanish literature,” explained the Mexican.
Gonzalo Celorio has received the highest award in Castilian-language literature, created in 1976 and endowed with 125,000 euros (tax-exempt), which recognizes an entire literary career. The award ceremony, with the presence of the King and Queen, will take place, as every year, on April 23, Book Day, the anniversary of the death of Cervantes (and Shakespeare), in the Great Hall of the University of Alcalá de Henares. His speech will deal, as he confirmed in his appearance, with “the late arrival of the novel to the American continent.” In his opinion, “the novel is a very dangerous genre… the novel is not a literary genre, it is a libertarian genre.”
The author offered a profound reflection on genres and “self-literature,” which he has practiced the most. “It is thought that self-literature is a literature of lyrical expression, but I believe it has expanded its boundaries,” he said. He recalled the figure of Michel de Montaigne, considered the creator of the essay genre, who experimented on himself, being both the subject and object of writing. And Celorio recalled the definition of the essay by the Mexican polymath Alfonso Reyes, as a “centaur” between genres: “It has a part of intellectual domain, but it also has an imaginative and passionate part, where the self expresses itself.” There is also self, of course, in the genre of memory; as well as in the chronicle: “Without the self, the chronicle is history,” said the award winner.
Celorio’s literature is precisely centered on memory, especially melancholic memory. He has described his books as “memorious novels,” where, recognizing the deceptive nature of memory (Ese montón de espejos rotos, titled, like a verse by Borges, his memoirs published by Tusquets), he delves into the blurry territory of family and literary past to generate new stories. “The self slips into all the interstices of writing to talk about my family,” the author argues, and it is Celorio himself —his memory— that acts as a common thread among all his novels, while tracing an image of modern Mexico.
“What is exceptional is the presence of the self in novelistic practice: the novel has always been considered, since the preceding epic genre, as the conquest of the third person,” he emphasized. And he recalled those fragments of Homer’s work in which the Greek poet slips into the narration to exhort Achilles or Hector to do this or that, or to embark on this or that battle. However, the mixing of genres and the proliferation of the self happens especially when Cervantes arrives and hybridization and the aforementioned “promiscuity” begin.
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Asturian Roots
The writer, who directs the Mexican Academy of Language and was director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica publishing house, is a Mexican with Asturian roots: Celorio is the name of a village near the town of Llanes, where the mountain range meets the Cantabrian Sea; it was his grandfather Emeterio who emigrated to make his fortune in the Americas, as the author recounts in the novel El metal y la escoria. He started as a grocery boy and ended up amassing a fortune as a liquor merchant, a fortune that his descendants squandered. In Tres lindas cubanas, the adventures of three friends who met his father in Havana are narrated; only one, Rosita, became his mother. In Los apóstatas, the spotlight shifts to the author’s brothers (Celorio was the eleventh of 12 siblings): one, influenced by Liberation Theology, is absorbed by the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. The attraction for the other is Mexican Baroque architecture. A whole lineage in novels: in “memorious novels.”
“No one truly knows who they are if they don’t know where they come from,” reflected the award winner. He intends for his family characters to gain independence from the writer and be embraced by readers. “Readers are a kind of masochist who are always buying conflicts that don’t belong to us, the conflicts of others: it’s the only way we have of knowing that we belong to the human race.”
The award also seems to be a sign of a certain political-cultural reconciliation between Spain and Mexico after a cooling of relations when then-Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador demanded an official apology in 2019 for the excesses of the Spanish conquest. The latest Princess of Asturias Awards also brought two accolades for Mexico: the Concord Award, for the National Museum of Anthropology, and the Arts Award, to photographer Graciela Iturbide. The exhibition La mitad del mundo. La mujer en el México indígena (Half the World. Women in Indigenous Mexico), which was distributed across several venues in Madrid, received great institutional reception.
Celorio believes that Spain’s request for forgiveness was “absurd.” It was “anachronistic,” he argued, because one cannot ask for forgiveness for what happened so many centuries ago, when states as they exist now did not even exist, and when there was already violence in indigenous societies themselves; and also “retrotropic,” for judging those indigenous societies as a kind of utopian lost paradise, without addressing their reality. As he pointed out, the Spanish language was not used to conquer, because the evangelizers learned indigenous languages for that purpose: “In reality, the Spanish language was not the language of conquest, but that of independence.”
