A book a day: Juan Eduardo Cirlot: Nebiros

Idioma original: castellano

Year of publication: 2016 (written in 1950)

Valuation: recommendable

Juan Eduardo Cirlot, poet and author of a few essays, wrote a single narrative work, which coincidentally is this Not falling apart which we discussed here today. Cirlot lived an early period in which he interacted with surrealist circles (he wrote articles in a magazine directed by André Breton himself) and with the artists of Dau al Set, in particular with Tàpies, with whom he would collaborate on several occasions. He was therefore a relatively prominent figure in the world of art and literature in the dark 40s and 50s of the last century, that is, in the darkest days of Franco’s regime. For some reason he destroyed all the unpublished literary production of his younger years, with one exception: again precisely our Not falling apartwhich would be rejected in its day by the censorship and of which some typewritten copy was preserved.

Why Francoist prudishness banned the text is explained in the interesting epilogue by Victoria Cirlot, philologist and daughter of the author, but it is well understood just by reading the book: it is not just the few references to religion and some very tangentially political comments. , not even the protagonist’s night tour through various brothels, including some small scenes that are a little, but only a little, more explicit. What the censor surely could not bear is the nihilistic atmosphere, the disorientation of an individual lost in his contradictions, the spiritual emptiness that seeps into every page. In a country led by the infallible paths set by the Government in material matters and the Catholic Church in moral matters, such a level of disbelief and anguish must have been unbearable.

Because there are several tons of all that. A nameless protagonist, like the streets or the city itself, leaves his office and at dusk he wanders aimlessly through the alleys near the port. Meanwhile, he lets his thoughts flow without restraint and without measure. At first we perceive a dejected, lonely, gray character, ‘looking unearthed’a figure that would have fascinated Cioran, for example, disappointed in the world and in himself. But it’s even worse. The subject is of such inconsistency that each page of dejection and surrender is followed by another in which he changes to a speech full of luminous intentions and trust in man. He cannot stand solitude or company, conversation or silence and, always failing in the search for an optimal term, the pendulum continues to swing endlessly from one extreme to the other.

Hence perhaps the stumbling through the night streets, the desire to return home immediately abandoned to continue the route, the stay in the tavern trying to avoid the waiter’s gaze, the choice of the deformed prostitute. Always moving in the mud, sometimes literally, on the border of dream, madness and memory, the right to pleasure is claimed (the right of the beggar to spend his alms on alcohol, the right of the worker to be happy for a few minutes). in the brothel, things that are somewhat Houellebecq), and scenes from the family home take center stage and, above all, the disturbing and powerful figure of the father, reflections and images through which ancient and deep wounds seem to appear. Or perhaps it is all the work of Nebiros, the demon whose merit lay in ‘a sin that the Bible alludes to, that cannot be named or, rather, of which the essence is unknown’. An unknown and therefore invincible evil, a threat that is only known to exist and that can be in the soul of the individual, in their head, in their past. Too much for the censor, who we imagine is frightened by so much desolation.

The truth is that the book works for the most part as a philosophical novel in which the narrative thread has rather little weight, and is rather an instrument to incorporate successive waves of reflections and illustrating them with images. Being Cirlot’s only work in prose, it gives the impression that he did not worry much about establishing a rhythm appropriate to the format and thus, the reading, although intense due to the disturbance it transmits, can become somewhat heavy if taken as a normal novel. . So we will have to see it as a mixture of essay and memoir arranged on a narrative support whose fundamental usefulness will be to transport us through the infected alleys, through the dangerous recesses of thought and memories.