Pol Guasch: "Without time there is no emotion"

I had heard of Pol Guasch as a kind of enfant terrible of Catalan literature due to his youth and his boldness in saying things, but I had not yet had the opportunity to read anything or discover the reason for that label. So I decided to turn a deaf ear to the buzz that often builds around someone, to focus on the work and enjoy a book without expectations.

I recognize myself as an intense reader and Napalm en el corazón has been devoured, literally, in a few days. It has captivated me in a way I didn't expect, because the book is about unspoken words that want to be named, if we can even say what a novel is about when, in reality, how it deals with it is more important.

--- The wait. I have the feeling that the characters at the beginning of the novel are waiting for something, as if stopped in time, right?

--- In the book ---the wait--- is linked to a specific conception of time, which focuses on a fragment of the characters' lives, of an indeterminate place and time. The novel places the action in a kind of suspension where the characters are hanging by the thread of the world, at the mercy of something we don't know what it is, suspended in a kind of non-time and non-space. I would say this is life. How to continue living in the midst of the battle between a codified world and time, like ours, governed by norms and rules to follow, versus life, which has no code, which is unexpected? The wait is also the consequence or the prelude to enigma and ignorance. Temporal and spatial codes allow you to understand life and solve the enigmas that arise. The novel wants to be an exploration of what happens when this disappears and the wait takes a central place: that of the impossibility of saying things in a transparent, clear, direct way.

--- Language. It is also a character, with a dimension beyond speech. It is the logos, the verb, the discourse, reason. Am I wrong?

--- I didn't want to fall into a Manichaean interpretation of coexistence between languages and cultures, but I also didn't want to fall into a false relativism [...]. Talking about languages allowed me to talk about codes, about ways of saying the world and designating it: it's a way to name the things around you. Language is a way of pointing and, therefore, also of creating oppression and power, of building victims and executioners. I was interested in exploring this aspect, not only as a linguistic issue in a cultural sense, but in a generational sense ---also in a sense of codes among equals---, because there is a struggle of languages present throughout the text: the one spoken by older people against the one spoken by young people, or the one spoken by the protagonist with his lover. There are many codes, many registers, many ways of not understanding each other, of disagreeing, and of oppressing through linguistic codes. I wanted to propose an exploration of all these ways of understanding what a language is.

--- The escape. The book's synopsis states that "the only alternative is to flee this wasteland." And the reader wonders, when will this escape begin?

--- As the world shrinks when language is lost. The dispossession of language is the dispossession of one's own world. There is a key moment in the novel ---which we don't want to spoil--- that triggers this forward flight explained on the back cover. That's why it becomes so necessary for the characters to recover their world, which seems to have been lost.

"How to continue living in the midst of the battle between a coded world and time, like ours, governed by norms and rules to follow, versus life, which has no code, which is unexpected?"

--- To love is, on the one hand, attention and, on the other hand, dedication. Attention transforms into dedication, and dedication must culminate in correspondence: this is how the course of love opens. The protagonist is a character who is constantly observing, but who does not judge. In that inattention, or in that disinterest, very powerful things grow, but also much evil is brewed. The protagonist, for me, is like a jellyfish, an amoeba in the middle of the sea that is being hit, moved by the waves, which are the others [...]. This is its potency, its strength, and at the same time its condemnation: the fact of living things without living them, which means living things halfway. But, in fact, I don't know if this is living halfway or living fully: living naked of prejudice.

--- Animality. Does the animal presence in the novel have a symbolic character, close to the mysticism established in some animistic cultures with power animals, but far from the classic human-animal dichotomy?

--- There is the human and there is the non-human animal, but one can learn from the other and vice versa. I was not interested in exploring what is human in the animal or what is animal in the human, because for me this difference does not exist. When I was writing the novel, I wondered what difference there is between this family that lives in a lost neighborhood in the middle of nowhere and the pack of wolves that lives in the mountains. I wanted to explore the relationship, the coexistence, from the complexity of living together, bearing in mind that living together is always desirable, but at the same time implies conflict. The encounter is powerful because it is conflictive.

"The protagonist is a character who is constantly observing, but who does not judge. In that inattention, or in that disinterest, very powerful things grow, but also much evil is brewed"

--- Is death the beginning of life? I think of Perejaume when he says that "creating does not last." What is important in the novel is not the time they are alive, but everything that has happened before and everything that will happen after. To the characters, it seems that nothing has happened to them in life, not even to the protagonist. But, what is it that weighs on them? What is it that has meaning in life for them? The mother, the father, the grandfather, the lover, the language... all taken to the extreme ---I like to push situations to the limit to bring out things that are hard to see when they are normalized and the waters are calm---. The lives they live are not epic, they are not heroic, they are not interesting and, from a hegemonic and canonical perspective, they are not worthy of being narrated either. These poor, sad lives, where nothing happens but survival. And this is what the novel is about, the struggle of the characters to turn surviving into living.

--- The inheritance. The weight of the unspoken word is one of the axes of the novel, which seems to be passed from one to another. I feel that you use language to fill the silences rooted within the characters, who seek a way to speak, to be.

--- I was very interested in the question of inheritance while writing the book. And I also wanted to bring together several types of inheritance in the same story: the symbolic burden of all the things that have happened and remain hidden in the silences; that which runs through the blood; the inheritance left by a language or a destroyed space... What ways are there to subvert inheritance and the place one occupies? The novel asks if it is possible to break this chain of inheritance. There are moments of liberation, in this relationship with what is inherited, there are moments of rupture and, therefore, of opening, but also moments of impossible-to-untie union. Inheritance is a fabric that is constantly unraveling and reconstructing itself.

--- Desire. I think it is the true leitmotiv of the novel!

--- In desire there is a very interesting thing, because it is a double-edged sword. The desirable horizon, the beloved space, the goal one wants to reach, is not so easy to define. But the unknown drive moves, activates, and gives birth to unexpected things. The characters find themselves on the tightrope of not knowing what they desire, but having a disordered longing that makes things move. And movement is always good, because it is in stagnation that waters rot. In that uncontrolled movement, in that chaos, there is much loss, much pain, but there is also much freshness. In the characters' failed or traumatic flight, in the escape full of pain, there is always the spark of something new.

--- Poetry. Is writing prose different from writing poetry?

--- You don't need inspiration or creativity to create, you don't need talent, the only thing you need is time and availability. Without time there is no emotion. Time to be able to channel emotions and thoughts, to turn them into an idea, to turn them into a word ---this only happens if one has the material time to sit down and dedicate oneself to creation---. Without this, there is only silence, unspoken words that accumulate.

"Poor, sad lives, where nothing happens but survival. And this is what the novel is about, the struggle of the characters to turn surviving into living"

--- Wajdi Mouawad is a fundamental author for me: how he says things, the themes he deals with, the perspective from which he approaches them. His ode to complexity, the will not to understand events from Manichaeism. The perspective that believes that in destruction there is new life. The rawness of the words. That is why I often return to Mouawad.

--- And now, how are you? What expectations do you have?

--- I have started writing after a long time, even though I still don't know where the creative process will go. To write, I needed time and silence, to get away from the book, and it is now that I have been able to start heading in that direction.