Miquel Bauçà, The Siege in the Room: Three Novellas,Trans. by Martha Tennent, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.
documentary: Miquel Bauçà, poeta invisible
This volume brings together three short novels by Catalan literature's great maverick and recluse, each depicting a brutal, abstract world where words are the only reality—shifting between the erudite, the archaic, and the vulgar. Carrer Marsala, which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya—neither of which Bauçà bothered to accept—is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In The Old Man, the narrator observes a strange building where a decrepit prisoner is ritually beaten by a policeman once a week. The Warden details the narrator's own captivity, and his relationship with the woman who keeps him prisoner. In Martha Tennent's haunting translation, reminiscent of a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Miquel Bauçà's work is a pungent reminder of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.
"Bauçà is both lucid and obtuse, holy and crazy, a symptom and an excrescence."-Julià Guillamon
"I was born on the 7th of February in the year 1940, and on the 14th of
the same month, twelve years later, mother decided to make me into an
orphan. I do not know if this was so as to take revenge or simply
because she was moved by an instinct for imitation."
-Miquel Bauçà
His collection of novellas, “The Siege in the Room: Three Novellas”,
had been recently translated from Catalan to English by Martha Tennent
and published by Dalkey Archive Press.
In
these three haunting novellas by Catalan literature’s great maverick
and recluse, Miquel Bauça, there is a pungent reminder, like a
Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, of the ways the world fails
its prophets and pariahs.
Carrer Marsala, which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya neither of which Bau bothered to accept is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In The Old Man, the narrator observes a strange building where a decrepit prisoner is ritually beaten by a policeman once a week. The Warden details the narrator s own captivity, and his relationship with the woman who keeps him prisoner. In Martha Tennent s haunting translation, reminiscent of a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Miquel Bauça’s work is a pungent reminder of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.
Miquel Bauça (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1940 – Barcelona, 2005), a poet and narrative writer was renowned for his verbal and social radicalism. He received the 1961 Salvat-Papasseit Prize for his work Una bella història (A Beautiful Story), the debut book of a young talent that dazzled the critics. He received other awards for later works, for example the 1974 Vicent Andrés Estellés Prize for Notes i comentaris (Notes and Comments) and the 1985 City of Barcelona Prize for Carrer Marsala (Marsala Street). ??The latter work, his first book in prose, marked a turning point in the critics’ reception of his writing. He had now become a writer of reference for those who wished to find a kind of literature that was committed to an integral idea of the human being and, thenceforth, efforts were made to try to draw him into a system that he always rejected one way or another. Hence, although he received the prestigious Sant Joan (Saint John) Prize for his novel L’estuari (The Estuary) in 1989, he never felt that he was part of the literary milieu of his times. Miquel Bauça also published the fictional work El canvi (The Change, 1997), an innovative collection of writings structured in the form of a dictionary, and Els somnis (Dreams, 2002), amongst other books.
In the last years of his life he removed himself even more from everyday realities but this never prompted him to abandon his writing, an oeuvre which is among the most original and intense to come out of the 1970s literary generation. Miquel Bauça died on 3 January 2005, leaving behind an unclassifiable literary corpus, which has unquestionably expanded the bounds of contemporary Catalan literature.
He was a member of the Association of Catalan Language Writers (AELC).
A Writer Shrouded in Myth
by Julià Guillamon
A few years ago, Jordi Coca wrote that Miquel Bauça was like Greta Garbo. Since Carrer Marsala [Marsala Street] appeared in 1985, a myth began to be built up around Miquel Bauça, based on his strange way of life. Unsociable and furtive, Bauça did not frequent literary circles. It was said that he lived apart from everyone, like a penniless outcast, in a caravan. Some people claimed they had seen him in a street, or in a bar. The veterans told stories about his first days in
Barcelona.
Apparently he wrote in one of the porched areas of the Paral.lel, where
he had set up his office. He would turn up at the house of one of his
writer friends and spend the night there whether they wanted him to or
not. Where was Miquel Bauça? Had he gone back to Majorca? Was he living
in the Eixample district of Barcelona? Tired of all this
rumor-mongering, Coca stood up at a congress of young writers, among
which there were fervent admirers and myth-makers, and with the greatest
respect, but with absolute firmness, affirmed that Bauça was
reproducing the syndrome of the invisible, besieged actress, and that
the obscurer aspects of his life were attracting more attention than his
literary work, and that one had to be careful, because Bauça was a sick
man.
Since then, two very clear positions have existed in regard to Bauça. There are those who think that Bauça is a modern classic and his work, a vital enigma, and those who believe that independently of the strength of his imagination and the power of his language, there is a lack of order and cohesive thought in the work of Bauça. One interpretation does not exclude the other. Bauça is both lucid and obtuse, holy and crazy, a symptom and an excrescence. Empúries has now published his Els estats de la connivència (The States of Connivance) which follows the encyclopaedic format of his most recent books, L’estuari (The Estuary) (1990), El crepuscle encén estels (The Twilight Lights Up Stars) (1992) and El canvi [The Change] (1998). The debate continues. - messmatch.com/
Carrer Marsala, which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya neither of which Bau bothered to accept is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In The Old Man, the narrator observes a strange building where a decrepit prisoner is ritually beaten by a policeman once a week. The Warden details the narrator s own captivity, and his relationship with the woman who keeps him prisoner. In Martha Tennent s haunting translation, reminiscent of a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Miquel Bauça’s work is a pungent reminder of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.
Miquel Bauça (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1940 – Barcelona, 2005), a poet and narrative writer was renowned for his verbal and social radicalism. He received the 1961 Salvat-Papasseit Prize for his work Una bella història (A Beautiful Story), the debut book of a young talent that dazzled the critics. He received other awards for later works, for example the 1974 Vicent Andrés Estellés Prize for Notes i comentaris (Notes and Comments) and the 1985 City of Barcelona Prize for Carrer Marsala (Marsala Street). ??The latter work, his first book in prose, marked a turning point in the critics’ reception of his writing. He had now become a writer of reference for those who wished to find a kind of literature that was committed to an integral idea of the human being and, thenceforth, efforts were made to try to draw him into a system that he always rejected one way or another. Hence, although he received the prestigious Sant Joan (Saint John) Prize for his novel L’estuari (The Estuary) in 1989, he never felt that he was part of the literary milieu of his times. Miquel Bauça also published the fictional work El canvi (The Change, 1997), an innovative collection of writings structured in the form of a dictionary, and Els somnis (Dreams, 2002), amongst other books.
In the last years of his life he removed himself even more from everyday realities but this never prompted him to abandon his writing, an oeuvre which is among the most original and intense to come out of the 1970s literary generation. Miquel Bauça died on 3 January 2005, leaving behind an unclassifiable literary corpus, which has unquestionably expanded the bounds of contemporary Catalan literature.
He was a member of the Association of Catalan Language Writers (AELC).
A Writer Shrouded in Myth
by Julià Guillamon
A few years ago, Jordi Coca wrote that Miquel Bauça was like Greta Garbo. Since Carrer Marsala [Marsala Street] appeared in 1985, a myth began to be built up around Miquel Bauça, based on his strange way of life. Unsociable and furtive, Bauça did not frequent literary circles. It was said that he lived apart from everyone, like a penniless outcast, in a caravan. Some people claimed they had seen him in a street, or in a bar. The veterans told stories about his first days in
Barcelona.
Apparently he wrote in one of the porched areas of the Paral.lel, where
he had set up his office. He would turn up at the house of one of his
writer friends and spend the night there whether they wanted him to or
not. Where was Miquel Bauça? Had he gone back to Majorca? Was he living
in the Eixample district of Barcelona? Tired of all this
rumor-mongering, Coca stood up at a congress of young writers, among
which there were fervent admirers and myth-makers, and with the greatest
respect, but with absolute firmness, affirmed that Bauça was
reproducing the syndrome of the invisible, besieged actress, and that
the obscurer aspects of his life were attracting more attention than his
literary work, and that one had to be careful, because Bauça was a sick
man.Since then, two very clear positions have existed in regard to Bauça. There are those who think that Bauça is a modern classic and his work, a vital enigma, and those who believe that independently of the strength of his imagination and the power of his language, there is a lack of order and cohesive thought in the work of Bauça. One interpretation does not exclude the other. Bauça is both lucid and obtuse, holy and crazy, a symptom and an excrescence. Empúries has now published his Els estats de la connivència (The States of Connivance) which follows the encyclopaedic format of his most recent books, L’estuari (The Estuary) (1990), El crepuscle encén estels (The Twilight Lights Up Stars) (1992) and El canvi [The Change] (1998). The debate continues. - messmatch.com/
The first sentence of The Siege in the Room is the most arresting in the book: “Maybe the world hasn’t always been sad.” It’s the opening of Miquel Bauca’s Carrer Marsala,
one of three texts translated and gathered by Martha Tennent for Dalkey
Archive. It comes out of nowhere, a sentence that can stop a reader
dead, like a wall built just past the starting line. Where can a writer
go from there? The paragraph continues:
Taking this into consideration, it is tempting to read the collection as psychiatric case study and to leave it at that, a minor curiosity in a minor language. And, to some degree, that approach has its merits. Bauca’s work exhibits classic characteristics of schizophrenic art. It is littered with hallucination, paranoia, and obsessive vitriol. It incessantly goes off the rails. In short, it continually borders on disjointedness.
A more charitable or patient reading, however, reveals Bauca’s attempts at fashioning something of deeper value. A typical passage, from Carrer Marsala, demonstrates this:
As a narrative strategy, this is risky and not entirely successful. But it is—and this is a point worth making about a writer who seemingly had to write—a strategy. Bauca is aware of the risk he’s taking, even if he often fails to reign himself in. The urge to do so, however, becomes a poignant motif throughout these works. The most urgent of his obsessions, one he returns to again and again, is a compulsive, desperate need to maintain composure; calmness, he believes, is the path to wisdom. This is most apparent in The Warden, which ostensibly chronicles the narrator’s possibly imaginary relationship with a woman who is his captor, fellow inmate, or both. A few fragments detail the urge:
In an interview published in Transcript, Bauca answered a question about his whittling down of Carrer Marsala in the following terms:
This forceful editing—done with a pair of scissors—results in show-stealing moments of comedic genius and occasionally dazzling lyricism. Bauca brings to mind Beckett or Stephen Wright when he suggests, “We should destroy the leaning Tower of Pisa accompanied by Diana Ross” and follows with a caveat that “The trouble is she’s often on tour and me in the hospital.” The jokes (are they?) rely upon an cannily specific use of the non sequitur, a notable characteristic of Bauca’s work. Why the leaning Tower? Why Diana Ross? The association is a private one without cause or effect in the work, arising and subsiding wavelike, leaving us questioning not the action, but the field from which it arises. Why again the following?
Whatever the case, our literature needs fringe figures like Bauca, invisible, besieged and battered, striving not for literary glory but something deeper—wisdom—that is always in such short supply that we should take it wherever we can find it, even if it’s hidden behind walls. - Stephen Sparks
Miquel Bauçà: the hidden genius of Catalan Writing
An interview with Miquel Bauçà , with an introduction, by Julià Guillamon.
Miquel Bauçà (Felanitx, Majorca, 1940) does not give interviews. Until now, he replied to interviewers' questions with extracts from his books. I seek him out. As there is no known address for him, I send letters and questionnaires to the PO Box number given at the end of his book 'Carrer Marsala'. A fax appears, sent from a stationer's on Bailèn Street, in Barcelona. Bauçà replies in an offended tone to the ten questions I sent to him over a fortnight ago.
What do you understand by states of connivance? Are you referring to the alienation of humans, to their love of gregariousness? Are you also referring to all the concessions the Catalans have made? To both things?
Exactly, to both things.
When you wrote Carrer Marsala you cut the original considerably, until you were left with a short narrative of seventy pages. Do you now wish to create all-embracing, encyclopaedic texts? What is the reason for this change?
It was a good thing, to have despised all that material. I would probably have waffled on and on. This change is due to an inevitable, automatic increase of wisdom, thanks to my good behaviour, not thanks to a wish to be all-embracing: the latter has always been the motor behind everything, it was there the first time I looked at the world.
I have read an interview in Destino magazine, about your first days in Barcelona. There you talk about your military service in Cabrera. Was it one of the most important experiences in your life?
Yes, it was.
The language of your books is highly elaborate. There are people who talk, when referring to it, about Ramon Llull. Do you read the Catalan classics? What role would you ascribe to the literary tradition in your work?
Ramon Llull belongs to the period in which we Catalans lived in paradise - a paradise as unlikely as the Biblical one, if we observe it from the standpoint of the general misery in which we find ourselves today - from which we were expelled, as everybody knows, because of some foreseeable manoeuvring on the part of Saint Viçenç Ferrer. I say this because your question should not have been proposed. Neither I nor anyone else can imitate Ramon Llull. That would be as extravagant as if a Venetian Jew of the period had wished to enter this paradise. That would also have resulted in a botched job.
We might say that one of the themes of 'The States of Connivance' is the disintegration of ideologies, of beliefs, of ways of life which formed a whole. Is this 'the change'?
Nothing has disintegrated so far. Everything is just as routine as when Saint Paul wrote to the Ephesians. However, we have started to change. I want to see a goal behind these modifications: the enjoyment of dreams, just as I already enjoy them. When technique forces everybody to do the same things, one will no longer wish to be a consumer of ideologies, as tools which are useful to others: neither macro or microideologies. Sexuality and its gregarious function will gradually vanish. On the other hand, people will exchange cassettes containing their best dreams, according to the criteria of each person. When I say cassettes I mean ideas, because a much more beautiful technology will have been developed.
In your books there are many references to America. What is America for you? Does it represent the ideals of progress, of technology, or is it something else entirely?
I can't believe that you could still say such a thing. You sound like a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the first half of the 20th century.
You have always lived your life away from literary circles. You show your face very rarely, and it is even difficult to interview you. What is your idea of what a writer ought to be? Should the writer live a furtive life?
Most definitely. I completely mistrust charlatan writers. I even accuse some of them of being responsible for the political disasters which have taken place since 1975. Some of them still live and keep on talking in Cornellà and on the Canal+ channel of CNN. Why do they do it? I think that they are mechanically repeating patterns which come from the 17th century, that are obsolete today, but which still have some kind of life.
The idea of sin, of guilt, appears very clearly in some of your books. In The States of Connivance, the following can be read: 'I have sinned. God is punishing me.' Is this concept of sin an essential element in your work?
When I say that, I am ridiculing the Freudian fervour which has sheltered itself from the Universe, and which would have us believe that what happened to us when we were babies, children, or impuberal, as regards the 'relational' aspect - as they say - explains everything. They have gone mad, and behave, more or less, like the inquisitors of the Inquisition. As if other experiences apart from the ones mentioned could not have played an efficient role in our formation, our make-up or, simply, our intelligence.
In your book you talk of God and the soul. But also about scientific and technological concepts. How do these two systems articulate themselves within your system of thought?
They don't articulate themselves, because they are the same thing: Technique, which must needs bring us to the discovery of the brain. I am currently writing a book, also in verse, which will probably have the following title: 'The Dreams'. You have to use verse for this sort of subject.
Since Carrer Marsala, your books have contained references to war. Do you believe that underneath the appearance of normality, we are spending our whole lives at war? Does your experience of military service in Cabrera have something to do with this?
War. I have the feeling that in the interview about Cabrera, I must have said a lot of nonsense, because I see that it has lead to this kind of thinking.
My name is Miquel Bauçà
The following lines appear under the title "Author's note" to the Obra poètica (Empúries, 1987). They are reproduced with permission from the publishers.
I was born on 7th of February in the year 1940, and on the 14th of the same month, twelve years later, mother decided to make me into an orphan. I do not know if this was so as to take revenge or simply because she was moved by an instinct for imitation. Four months earlier, I had run away from home, taking advantage of the fact that father, a very God-fearing man, had agreed to deliver me over to a sect of devout peasant men, still burning with the ardour of having won the war.
All these events had as their backdrop a countryside home in the south-east zone of the largest of the [Balearic] Islands, a home built by my maternal grandfather with pieces of ashlar, which he himself extracted from a nearby quarry. This grandfather had gone off to Argentina, in a transatlantic ship full of Slavs, who drank, sang and sweated in the hold. In the latter country he got so homesick that he had to come back, carrying nothing else but a revolver, which soon got rusty, exposed as it was to the rough handling of the children.
So, the winters I spent in the company of those devout men, in the Capital; in the summer, on the other hand, I helped father with his most clearly defined passion: building dry stone walls so as to divide and subdivide a plot of brushwood, which had been purchased with the jewels of his wife.
This lasted until I was eighteen. From that time onward, I do not believe it is necessary to mention anything especially remarkable.
Miquel Bauçà
A selection of entries from El Canvi
El canvi, Barcelone, Empúries, 1998.
El Canvi is a dictionnary is which the author describes and defines chosen words. Transcript offers a selection of these below.
1 Anguish [détresse]
I feel the sting of anguish simply
because of the revelation or perception of Being, not because of the
perception of the nothingness of human existence ...
Anguish [détresse]: 'According to Kierkegaard, a mood, not determined by anything in particular, characteristic of a human, which reveals the essence of his being to him: the nothingness of human existence, due to its finite nature, before the infinite nature of God'.
My experience has not been quite the same. I feel the sting of anguish simply because of the revelation or perception of the Being, not because of the perception of the nothingness of human existence: - the latter is an item of knowledge as banal and obvious as knowing the name of the stations on a given metro line before the infinite nature of God. The infinite nature of God doesn't bother me one bit. It would be the worse for Him, if it did. It is a contradiction, to consider such things, because to compare the finite with the infinite, means that you are saying that human existence is not as insignificant as all that. The feeling of vast magnitudes only exists when one is a child or a pre-pubescent. Afterwards, it disappears. I do not believe in God for one elementary reason: if I believed in Him my sense of asphyxia not of finiteness would increase, which is something I cannot let happen. I feel a kind of claustrophobia I have forever engraved within me the childhood experience of going into a cave and not knowing how to get out with respect to relationships of dependence, whatever they might be and whatever form they might take. It is a pity that we do not have an indicator of the degree of anguish which afflicts us, which we reach, with the aim of putting a definite limit to it. Now we don't know how far we can go. But, of course, if we knew, maybe then we would not experience any anguish, most likely. It is impossible to make a comprehensive and well-classified list of states of détresse, typified by popular wisdom or by other forms of wisdom. Nor even of states of euphoria, even though these are far less prolific.
In a strictly medical (medic) sense, I would say that anguish is like an alarm which goes off not because of a danger or a supposed danger, but is rather a warning that we have taken a detour off the correct path. A condemned man, if he is on the correct path, walks, satisfied, along the corridor to the scaffold. The best known case of this is Jesus, who, on the way to Calvary, spoke at leisure with the crowd who had gone to see him. If he felt a moment of anguish once he was nailed up, this is due to some kind of error that he made immediately before or during the walk.
2 America
'We ought to hate the Americans because they sponsored the Dictatorship. But they had to, because London ordered them to.'
America: It generates three errors, which may be perceived without any effort: 1: the way non-Americans interpret it; 2: the vision the English have of it; 3: the idea that the Americans themselves have of it.
What really attracts us about America is not its power: it is the cleanliness, which is given off by the objects they invent, produce and use there: from a skyscraper to a cowshed. This inevitably leads one to believe that morally, too, they are clean and transparent, and, to put it better, accessible. To put it another way: the message is cleanliness. It seems that they are always ready to explain how they have done this, the procedure, which is the first thing that other tribes hide away and will never tell you about. The latter make themselves impenetrable and cannot export their products, because these will always appear suspicious. The Chinese are the supreme representatives of this. The history of the secret of the manufacture of silk is not altogether insignificant.
The important thing is simply that America exists, not for any particular reason, not because of the Americans or what they do. If America is rich and powerful, this is a secondary aspect, and inevitably inevitable. Cretins the world over, even stupid Americans, think that this is what is really important, but the value of America is nothing to do with its power or development: it is based on the fact that America is a metaphysical event of such magnitude that it is even quite observable, unlike other metaphysical events which can only be grasped by poets.
I will never go there. That would be like profaning the most sacred thing. If I had to flee once more from our enemies, I would install myself in the Sahara. I know in which place.
The other States and tribes could vanish and it would be a tiny episode, with no more importance than a cyclone.
We ought to hate the Americans because they sponsored the Dictatorship. But they had to, because London ordered them to. The explanation has nothing to do with the Soviet Union. I view such filial love with tenderness, and so I forgive them. The Dictatorship was a revenge or a sign of disdain on the part of the English that went against our enemies, not against us.
Possible a secondary aspect of my passion for America has to do with the revenge implied by the thought that it was precisely our enemies who discovered their Continent.
I know that it will be hard for me to make myself understood, but America is not movies or caterpillars or even computers.
A disadvantage of the real existence of America is that it does not permit the pleasure of recreating, discovering, obvious things as we wish. I remember with what pleasure I read û in special and de luxe editions things such as the fact that 'form and content' go together like a horse and carriage or that the material of which a thing is made determines its form... At that time such things were sweet as honey, because I did not know that in America they were public knowledge, just like so many other things which were public knowledge. Under the delirium of Franco's rule, they were like milestones that could only be reached after a sweaty effort; magnificent discoveries; secrets with a high strategic value.
www.transcript-review.org/
When we say our words are dragged down by inertia, we mean that what we learn as a pup stays with us. The same applies to other things. Girls, for example, use the phone but don’t know its precise function.Bauca (1940-2005), a reclusive Catalan writer troubled by alcoholism and schizophrenia who believed that the writer should lead a furtive life, placed great, possibly excessive, value on enclosure. Perhaps this was genetic: he explains in a rare biographical note that a memorable part of his childhood was spent helping his father “with his most clearly defined passion: constructing dry walls in order to divide and subdivide the bit of scrubland” his old man owned. Whatever the explanation, Bauca, a self-confessed “apartment hermit,” needed walls. He hid behind them where they existed, erected them where they didn’t, and much of the action in the three novellas collected here—The Old Man and The Warden round out the collection—takes place within the hermetic confines of inescapable rooms in which his obsessive narrators spool out uninterrupted monologues on everything from the mysteries of the female sex to the value of corporal self-punishment. Given this, it’s perhaps not surprising to find that Bauca’s prose is studded with obstacles—“well-laid linguistic traps,” his translator calls them. And not only his prose, as an approach to the writer himself requires a series of detours around unflattering labels. He was called a misogynist, a homophobe, and a racist. He inveighed against Parisians and weathermen. His insensitivity is distasteful, of course, even if somewhat tempered by his obvious mental instability.
Taking this into consideration, it is tempting to read the collection as psychiatric case study and to leave it at that, a minor curiosity in a minor language. And, to some degree, that approach has its merits. Bauca’s work exhibits classic characteristics of schizophrenic art. It is littered with hallucination, paranoia, and obsessive vitriol. It incessantly goes off the rails. In short, it continually borders on disjointedness.
A more charitable or patient reading, however, reveals Bauca’s attempts at fashioning something of deeper value. A typical passage, from Carrer Marsala, demonstrates this:
The sun is more and more cold, but very Elizabethan. Now is the time to pluck up our courage. A lot of energy is required if we want to avoid danger and not punish the dog too hastily, which would leave our nerves frayed. So, are there people who live together without touching one another? Maybe, maybe not. In any event, apparently the instinct is to do something.Even a small sample size taken out of context—it would be fair to say there is no context—this drily humorous lyrical nonsense bears evidence of a subtle (and antagonistic) literary mind. One senses that behind the facade of his logic-defying prose, between the occult, dreamlike associations, there stands an underlying structure. It is almost impossible to resist the urge to tease out connections, to patch together from Bauca’s disconnected sentences an order, however flimsy. Is he pulling one over on us? Or is his work an exercise in subverting readerly expectation? This uncertainty is compounded by the manic energy of his prose, which has the careening speed of a mad flight, as if it’s been given a slight push from the top of a hill. Offering no reassurance, Bauca tests his reader’s courage with this blind plummet. His prose verges on excess, shifting without apparent logic, skittering through brambles of non-sequiturs. And, despite the thrill of the fall, there is nothing carefree about it.
As a narrative strategy, this is risky and not entirely successful. But it is—and this is a point worth making about a writer who seemingly had to write—a strategy. Bauca is aware of the risk he’s taking, even if he often fails to reign himself in. The urge to do so, however, becomes a poignant motif throughout these works. The most urgent of his obsessions, one he returns to again and again, is a compulsive, desperate need to maintain composure; calmness, he believes, is the path to wisdom. This is most apparent in The Warden, which ostensibly chronicles the narrator’s possibly imaginary relationship with a woman who is his captor, fellow inmate, or both. A few fragments detail the urge:
People far wiser than I have been able to elude both danger and shame…In themselves, these verbal reminders humanize Bauca: one feels for his first-person stand-ins, even if they’re not entirely sympathetic. Sympathy alone, of course, does not a literary work make, nor does it do enough to offset the irrationality of Bauca’s prose. But again, the writer redeems himself with flashes of lyricism and deadpan humor.
I’m not as wise as I should be…
I have to be good, draw upon her wisdom…
What is their secret? This knowledge cannot be learned; it is either hereditary or the fruit of some early instinct…
In an interview published in Transcript, Bauca answered a question about his whittling down of Carrer Marsala in the following terms:
It was a good thing, to have despised all that material. I would probably have waffled on and on. This change is due to an inevitable, automatic increase of wisdom, thanks to my good behavior, not thanks to a wish to be all-embracing: the latter has always been the motor behind everything, it was there the first time I looked at the world.Taken alongside an anecdote Tennent includes in her introduction, that Bauca relied on a literary acquaintance to “cut anything [he] didn’t understand” from the work, one begins to understand Bauca’s desire for method, if not its attainment. His editorial insistence reveals an understanding of technique absent from most logomaniacal production. Bauca, whose writing evolved from realist to outlandish, culminating in avant-garde alphabetical poems (none of which have been translated, it seems), was not merely a madman with a typewriter, he was a formally inventive stylist, one who understood the value of excision and the power of disjunction. Even if he was slave to his compulsions, he knew that he had to shape them. “The typewriter stops, then starts up, again and again, as if it wanted to go somewhere,” he writes.
This forceful editing—done with a pair of scissors—results in show-stealing moments of comedic genius and occasionally dazzling lyricism. Bauca brings to mind Beckett or Stephen Wright when he suggests, “We should destroy the leaning Tower of Pisa accompanied by Diana Ross” and follows with a caveat that “The trouble is she’s often on tour and me in the hospital.” The jokes (are they?) rely upon an cannily specific use of the non sequitur, a notable characteristic of Bauca’s work. Why the leaning Tower? Why Diana Ross? The association is a private one without cause or effect in the work, arising and subsiding wavelike, leaving us questioning not the action, but the field from which it arises. Why again the following?
Unless I can immediately establish myself in a hotel in Utah, I’ll start to tremble and smash my dishes. It will begin to rain. A nervous, absurd rain. I attempt to open and close the windows. Quite pointless.These three novellas, with their constantly shifting and tangling, are difficult to pin down. At times I felt that the prose was working on me, the reader, rather than the other way around. I was uncertain as who, exactly, was besieged: reader or writer? As a consequence, I find it difficult to make definitive statements about Bauca’s work. Are these the products of genius? Some thought so: Carrer Marsala, the most digressive and associative of the three pieces collected here, a long monologue chronicling a litany of fantastic complaints, desires, and impossible encounters, earned its author prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya—neither of which, his publisher boasts, he bothered to accept. Or are these the works of an incoherent, obsessive schizophrenic? Bauca forces us into that ambiguous no man’s land of uncertainty, a gray area we are all too likely to avoid in favor of something easier.
Whatever the case, our literature needs fringe figures like Bauca, invisible, besieged and battered, striving not for literary glory but something deeper—wisdom—that is always in such short supply that we should take it wherever we can find it, even if it’s hidden behind walls. - Stephen Sparks
Miquel Bauçà: the hidden genius of Catalan Writing
Miquel Bauçà (Felanitx, Majorca, 1940) does not give interviews. Until now, he replied to interviewers' questions with extracts from his books. I seek him out. As there is no known address for him, I send letters and questionnaires to the PO Box number given at the end of his book 'Carrer Marsala'. A fax appears, sent from a stationer's on Bailèn Street, in Barcelona. Bauçà replies in an offended tone to the ten questions I sent to him over a fortnight ago.
What do you understand by states of connivance? Are you referring to the alienation of humans, to their love of gregariousness? Are you also referring to all the concessions the Catalans have made? To both things?
Exactly, to both things.
When you wrote Carrer Marsala you cut the original considerably, until you were left with a short narrative of seventy pages. Do you now wish to create all-embracing, encyclopaedic texts? What is the reason for this change?
It was a good thing, to have despised all that material. I would probably have waffled on and on. This change is due to an inevitable, automatic increase of wisdom, thanks to my good behaviour, not thanks to a wish to be all-embracing: the latter has always been the motor behind everything, it was there the first time I looked at the world.
I have read an interview in Destino magazine, about your first days in Barcelona. There you talk about your military service in Cabrera. Was it one of the most important experiences in your life?
Yes, it was.
The language of your books is highly elaborate. There are people who talk, when referring to it, about Ramon Llull. Do you read the Catalan classics? What role would you ascribe to the literary tradition in your work?
Ramon Llull belongs to the period in which we Catalans lived in paradise - a paradise as unlikely as the Biblical one, if we observe it from the standpoint of the general misery in which we find ourselves today - from which we were expelled, as everybody knows, because of some foreseeable manoeuvring on the part of Saint Viçenç Ferrer. I say this because your question should not have been proposed. Neither I nor anyone else can imitate Ramon Llull. That would be as extravagant as if a Venetian Jew of the period had wished to enter this paradise. That would also have resulted in a botched job.
We might say that one of the themes of 'The States of Connivance' is the disintegration of ideologies, of beliefs, of ways of life which formed a whole. Is this 'the change'?
Nothing has disintegrated so far. Everything is just as routine as when Saint Paul wrote to the Ephesians. However, we have started to change. I want to see a goal behind these modifications: the enjoyment of dreams, just as I already enjoy them. When technique forces everybody to do the same things, one will no longer wish to be a consumer of ideologies, as tools which are useful to others: neither macro or microideologies. Sexuality and its gregarious function will gradually vanish. On the other hand, people will exchange cassettes containing their best dreams, according to the criteria of each person. When I say cassettes I mean ideas, because a much more beautiful technology will have been developed.
In your books there are many references to America. What is America for you? Does it represent the ideals of progress, of technology, or is it something else entirely?
I can't believe that you could still say such a thing. You sound like a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the first half of the 20th century.
You have always lived your life away from literary circles. You show your face very rarely, and it is even difficult to interview you. What is your idea of what a writer ought to be? Should the writer live a furtive life?
Most definitely. I completely mistrust charlatan writers. I even accuse some of them of being responsible for the political disasters which have taken place since 1975. Some of them still live and keep on talking in Cornellà and on the Canal+ channel of CNN. Why do they do it? I think that they are mechanically repeating patterns which come from the 17th century, that are obsolete today, but which still have some kind of life.
The idea of sin, of guilt, appears very clearly in some of your books. In The States of Connivance, the following can be read: 'I have sinned. God is punishing me.' Is this concept of sin an essential element in your work?
When I say that, I am ridiculing the Freudian fervour which has sheltered itself from the Universe, and which would have us believe that what happened to us when we were babies, children, or impuberal, as regards the 'relational' aspect - as they say - explains everything. They have gone mad, and behave, more or less, like the inquisitors of the Inquisition. As if other experiences apart from the ones mentioned could not have played an efficient role in our formation, our make-up or, simply, our intelligence.
In your book you talk of God and the soul. But also about scientific and technological concepts. How do these two systems articulate themselves within your system of thought?
They don't articulate themselves, because they are the same thing: Technique, which must needs bring us to the discovery of the brain. I am currently writing a book, also in verse, which will probably have the following title: 'The Dreams'. You have to use verse for this sort of subject.
Since Carrer Marsala, your books have contained references to war. Do you believe that underneath the appearance of normality, we are spending our whole lives at war? Does your experience of military service in Cabrera have something to do with this?
War. I have the feeling that in the interview about Cabrera, I must have said a lot of nonsense, because I see that it has lead to this kind of thinking.
My name is Miquel Bauçà
I was born on 7th of February in the year 1940, and on the 14th of the same month, twelve years later, mother decided to make me into an orphan. I do not know if this was so as to take revenge or simply because she was moved by an instinct for imitation. Four months earlier, I had run away from home, taking advantage of the fact that father, a very God-fearing man, had agreed to deliver me over to a sect of devout peasant men, still burning with the ardour of having won the war.
All these events had as their backdrop a countryside home in the south-east zone of the largest of the [Balearic] Islands, a home built by my maternal grandfather with pieces of ashlar, which he himself extracted from a nearby quarry. This grandfather had gone off to Argentina, in a transatlantic ship full of Slavs, who drank, sang and sweated in the hold. In the latter country he got so homesick that he had to come back, carrying nothing else but a revolver, which soon got rusty, exposed as it was to the rough handling of the children.
So, the winters I spent in the company of those devout men, in the Capital; in the summer, on the other hand, I helped father with his most clearly defined passion: building dry stone walls so as to divide and subdivide a plot of brushwood, which had been purchased with the jewels of his wife.
This lasted until I was eighteen. From that time onward, I do not believe it is necessary to mention anything especially remarkable.
Miquel Bauçà
A selection of entries from El Canvi
El Canvi is a dictionnary is which the author describes and defines chosen words. Transcript offers a selection of these below.
1 Anguish [détresse]
Anguish [détresse]: 'According to Kierkegaard, a mood, not determined by anything in particular, characteristic of a human, which reveals the essence of his being to him: the nothingness of human existence, due to its finite nature, before the infinite nature of God'.
My experience has not been quite the same. I feel the sting of anguish simply because of the revelation or perception of the Being, not because of the perception of the nothingness of human existence: - the latter is an item of knowledge as banal and obvious as knowing the name of the stations on a given metro line before the infinite nature of God. The infinite nature of God doesn't bother me one bit. It would be the worse for Him, if it did. It is a contradiction, to consider such things, because to compare the finite with the infinite, means that you are saying that human existence is not as insignificant as all that. The feeling of vast magnitudes only exists when one is a child or a pre-pubescent. Afterwards, it disappears. I do not believe in God for one elementary reason: if I believed in Him my sense of asphyxia not of finiteness would increase, which is something I cannot let happen. I feel a kind of claustrophobia I have forever engraved within me the childhood experience of going into a cave and not knowing how to get out with respect to relationships of dependence, whatever they might be and whatever form they might take. It is a pity that we do not have an indicator of the degree of anguish which afflicts us, which we reach, with the aim of putting a definite limit to it. Now we don't know how far we can go. But, of course, if we knew, maybe then we would not experience any anguish, most likely. It is impossible to make a comprehensive and well-classified list of states of détresse, typified by popular wisdom or by other forms of wisdom. Nor even of states of euphoria, even though these are far less prolific.
In a strictly medical (medic) sense, I would say that anguish is like an alarm which goes off not because of a danger or a supposed danger, but is rather a warning that we have taken a detour off the correct path. A condemned man, if he is on the correct path, walks, satisfied, along the corridor to the scaffold. The best known case of this is Jesus, who, on the way to Calvary, spoke at leisure with the crowd who had gone to see him. If he felt a moment of anguish once he was nailed up, this is due to some kind of error that he made immediately before or during the walk.
2 America
America: It generates three errors, which may be perceived without any effort: 1: the way non-Americans interpret it; 2: the vision the English have of it; 3: the idea that the Americans themselves have of it.
What really attracts us about America is not its power: it is the cleanliness, which is given off by the objects they invent, produce and use there: from a skyscraper to a cowshed. This inevitably leads one to believe that morally, too, they are clean and transparent, and, to put it better, accessible. To put it another way: the message is cleanliness. It seems that they are always ready to explain how they have done this, the procedure, which is the first thing that other tribes hide away and will never tell you about. The latter make themselves impenetrable and cannot export their products, because these will always appear suspicious. The Chinese are the supreme representatives of this. The history of the secret of the manufacture of silk is not altogether insignificant.
The important thing is simply that America exists, not for any particular reason, not because of the Americans or what they do. If America is rich and powerful, this is a secondary aspect, and inevitably inevitable. Cretins the world over, even stupid Americans, think that this is what is really important, but the value of America is nothing to do with its power or development: it is based on the fact that America is a metaphysical event of such magnitude that it is even quite observable, unlike other metaphysical events which can only be grasped by poets.
I will never go there. That would be like profaning the most sacred thing. If I had to flee once more from our enemies, I would install myself in the Sahara. I know in which place.
The other States and tribes could vanish and it would be a tiny episode, with no more importance than a cyclone.
We ought to hate the Americans because they sponsored the Dictatorship. But they had to, because London ordered them to. The explanation has nothing to do with the Soviet Union. I view such filial love with tenderness, and so I forgive them. The Dictatorship was a revenge or a sign of disdain on the part of the English that went against our enemies, not against us.
Possible a secondary aspect of my passion for America has to do with the revenge implied by the thought that it was precisely our enemies who discovered their Continent.
I know that it will be hard for me to make myself understood, but America is not movies or caterpillars or even computers.
A disadvantage of the real existence of America is that it does not permit the pleasure of recreating, discovering, obvious things as we wish. I remember with what pleasure I read û in special and de luxe editions things such as the fact that 'form and content' go together like a horse and carriage or that the material of which a thing is made determines its form... At that time such things were sweet as honey, because I did not know that in America they were public knowledge, just like so many other things which were public knowledge. Under the delirium of Franco's rule, they were like milestones that could only be reached after a sweaty effort; magnificent discoveries; secrets with a high strategic value.
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