This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Carme Riera / Antonio Tabernero, CNIO.
What is the purpose of literature today? Does it still have the power to change the world? “The novels of the 19th century were revolutionary; they changed laws or anticipated them; now literature no longer plays that role,” says writer Carme Riera. Before, in Spain we had Cervantes, in Italy, Dante; now, to unite a country “we have football teams”.
Riera, professor and academic of the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE), declares herself an “admirer of Margarita Salas”, and for that reason she accepted without hesitation an invitation from the CNIO’s Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) office to give a conference.
She titled it How to Write a Novel, but she talked about much more: artificial intelligence; the not always good relationship between women writers and the RAE; and bilingualism, among other topics. You can watch the whole conference here (in Spanish).
Riera writes simultaneously in Spanish and Catalan: “I have two computers, on one there is a page in Catalan and on the other in Spanish, and the two [novels] run parallel.” She was the winner, in 1995, of the First National Narrative Prize awarded to a novel written in the Catalan language. In 2015, she also won the National Spanish Literature Prize. “For me, languages are like panes of glass through which you see the world. English, German, Spanish or Catalan are not the same.”
Women, “only there to reproduce”
In her lecture, Riera analysed the essential role of women in the transmission of language: “Since ancient times women have been the first to teach language to their children by singing lullabies” and telling them stories “to instruct them”.
However, as in many other fields, they have not been the ones who have gone down in history. “I’m sure Hans Christian Andersen brought a lot of ideas to The Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid and The Emperor’s New Clothes, but they were handed down to him orally by women,” she said.
Riera quoted editor Esther Tusquets, who claimed that “jam made by female hands is delicious, but it cannot be compared to the Sistine Chapel.” And she responded: “Of course, but do we know why we have not been able to paint the Sistine Chapel? Obviously, because we have been rejected for centuries from the creative arena. We have been told that we were only there to reproduce.”
Antonio Tabernero. CNIO.
Words with wings and musical phrases
What are the limits of language? For Riera, “one of the most important problems when you write is precisely knowing if through language you are able to convey what you want.” She has an “fail-safe” method to find out: “read the text aloud.” “Words have wings,” so, in addition to finding the exact terms, “they must have the right cadence.”
Another tip for writers: the first sentences of a novel are important, because they establish the environment. La Regenta starts “the city of heroes was having a nap”; but “cities of heroes don’t have naps; there is a brutal irony in this, and that is where all the keys can be found”, says Riera. “The first sentences have to be musical, and offer the possibility to continue reading. There’s so little time for reading, so we’d better read things that we like.”
The writer also talked about the drama of the blank page, and even “the book you throw in the bin.” Which brings us back to the purpose of literature.
Literature as the pleasure of a few
In the United States, Riera remembers seeing tobacco factories in which a person would read at a lectern and workers listened while they worked. “In the 19th century, the ideas of socialists who changed history entered through literature.” Not any more. Similarly, the cohesion of a country no longer comes from its literati or its national classics.
Riera recognises her own pessimism in concluding that literature will once again become a minority interest: “The best-selling titles are no longer literature, they are self-help books. Today the need for self-help is much more important than that of literature.”
Carme Riera was born in Palma de Mallorca. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and is an honorary professor of Spanish Literature also at the UAB.
She is also director of the Goytisolo Chair, an academic of the Barcelona Royal Academy of Literature since 2002 and an academic of the RAE since 2013. She is president of CEDRO, the Spanish Centre for Graphic Rights. Her narrative works include En el último azul, Por el cielo y más allá and La mitad del alma, translated into 16 languages.