Just to be on the safe side, his grandmother had warned him when he was taken away that dare he return in priest’s garb, she would strangle him. What he came back dressed in thirty years later, though, was the Spanish language as well as a uniquely obsidian sentimental education that would chisel one of the most renegade and uncomfortable literary testaments of Spain — for both the establishment and anti-establishment alike. “Who do I write against?” Chirbes once asked rhetorically: “I write against myself. If you stand yourself up against the character you most despise, you’ll find your own contradictions staring straight back at you.” His novels sprout from a deep human disquiet and this inexorable process of self-examination — novels as private passions that take a public form. Writing as a means for making sense of things that seem incongruous, as a way of broaching that nagging question that won’t go away. First comes fixing the perspective, the way of looking, the point of view from which the story is to unfold, and once he catches sight of the figure trapped in the marble, Chirbes takes no prisoners in the carving, the shaving, the filing, the telling. Not even himself.
It’s not hard to imagine how these years went into crafting a certain narrative distance in his writing, which is an essential feature; the objectivity and detached scrutiny of a solitary, acutely observant child stunned by the weirdness of a strange new environment, the alienation of a new language with its new possibilities. Not merely the desire but also the ambition to make sense of it by naming and appropriating and organizing the derangement of a peculiar alternate domain. Though stripped of his native Valencian, he gained the high artifice and syntactical precision of Castilian, a language he fell in love with and a literary tradition he absorbed copiously — along with the French — and with which he was in constant, intense conversation throughout his life; from his revered seventeenth-century Baltazar Gracián — whose philosophy of skepticism influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche — to a forty-year love affair with the writing of Benito Pérez Galdós and of his beloved Mexican-exiled French-German-Jewish-Spanish experimentalist Max Aub. No hay mal que por bien no venga (all clouds have a silver lining) Chirbes said of being sent away as a boy; it caused him to relinquish any identification with a single place on earth. He became a stateless writer “freed of any romantic baggage” that would wax syrupy on the orange blossom breeze of Mediterranean writing and disregard the ripe stench of its marshlands. On the Edge is set in Valencia, yet its intentions are closer to how Gracián “works everyday language in a way that deviates from it enough that it neither falls into caricature nor mere reproduction.” He also pointed to Jonathan Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub” for the indulgence of its digressions, and closely identified with the intentions of John Dos Passos. On the Edge is a poetic spasm, an epic of the garbage dump written by a witness who breaks the underclass’s legacy of silence during a crisis that is not merely economic, but social and acutely moral. The song of the real estate siren from its debris-ridden cesspool, the swan song of the hope that was deposited in a generation, his generation, who held the country’s future in their once-militant hands and yet quickly betrayed those who, with a modicum of dignity, had struggled before them during the years of the regime. There’s no dignity in the struggle against greed in a world where values have shifted away from the human. You’re just poor. But Chirbes would quote Hermann Broch: “Was there ever a time when values were not in crisis?” He believed that the novel as a form is inescapably a creature of its time and that any writer who considers it to have some supreme value-in-itself as a piece of artifice reduces the form to something banal, a paltry toy. Even in language’s search for what’s on the inside, there is a relationship, a tie, to what’s on the outside. Writers who don’t understand this connection, Chirbes felt, yet claimed to inhabit literature as if a sacred temple, are really living in a dollhouse. And like selfish children they are negating the novel’s public concern, canceling its role in civil accountability.
At a precocious sixteen, and despite the stacked odds, Chirbes moved to Madrid where he studied Modern and Contemporary History at Universidad Complutense. There he joined an underground student group and became involved in clandestine, anti-Franco activities that landed him in Carabanchel prison. He also worked in several bookstores, notably Tarantula in the early ’70s, which fed his voracious reading habits and exposed him to many of the books prohibited by the regime that were kept hidden away in a special room, like a speakeasy its bottles of whisky: Sade, Miller, Marx, Lawrence, Aub and Juan Marsé, among many other delicacies. History, politics, social movements and literature converged in these years, and crystalized his perspective as an eyewitness. He spent the rest of his life narrating — in a great, twirling kaleidoscope of voices — the annals of this generation of young rebels who grew into tentative democrats: how many of them fell into the habits of their predecessors, how daily life is much harder to bear than putting up a good fight, how hard it is not to betray the ideals they had fought for as students when it came their time to make life choices. As the French writer Jean Genet quipped when asked what he would like from the world, “I would like for the world not to change so that I can be against the world.” For many, fighting against Franco had been much easier than forging a democracy, which obliges thinking of the greater good.
Chirbes went to Paris for a year and became a consummate Francophile, devouring all of Proust and declaring himself a “Proustian Leninist.” He read the maudits, Zola, saw the films of Renoir, Ophüls, Godard, listened to Debussy, Satie. “Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant are in me, they are in my novels, they are me. I admire Sartre and Camus in some books, but others are boring. I admit that Braudel is magisterial. I like Carrère’s Limonov and The Wound by Laurent Mauvignier.” From Paris he headed for the Morocco of Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, and Mohamed Choukri to teach the history of Moslem Spain in a school in Fez without knowing “a potato” of Arabic. Chirbes was searching elsewhere for paradise; Franco had died and the free-for-all atmosphere disturbed him. He quickly discovered Morocco was no nirvana either, but the experience spurred the writing of his first published novel, the alcohol-infused Mimoun. The novel oozes sexual tension and debauchery and an idea that “life is dirty, pleasure and pain sweat, excrete, smell. No human is anything more than a badly stitched sack of muck.” His life-long fascination with the work of painters like Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud should come as no surprise. His writing eventually worked into a style that broke with any conventional idea of realism; his sharp-edged hyper-realism moves into the poetic, the revealing detail so excruciatingly exact, existentially emblematic, that it becomes unbearable, searing. In his later novels, the aging human body serves as a symbol of the decadence and decay of the political and social body, too. It was the novelist Carmen Martín Gaite who first discovered his work. She sent the manuscript of Mimou to Jorge Herralde at Anagrama, who called immediately and encouraged Chirbes to present the novel for the Herralde prize. His debut was voted the runner-up. Herralde continued reassuring Chirbes at a crucial moment in his creative life, and Chirbes never forgot it. The relationship between writer and editor would last his lifetime and produce several novels and essay collections.
History for Rafael Chirbes was the key that opened his creative spigot, the present was the crystallization of the past and a writer was an antenna able to capture what Chateaubriand called an epoch’s esprit principe. He embraced Walter Benjamin’s concept of the moment of danger, “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. .. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. .. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Benjamin is one of the ghosts, the deceased writers that Chribes talked to, listened to: Cervantes, Tolstoy, Montaigne, Yourcenar, Lucretius, Virgil, Döblin, Faulkner, Eça de Quierós.