Rodrigo Fresán: "I always wanted to be a writer"

On the night of December 10, 1831, Allan Melvill crossed the frozen Hudson River. He was returning from Manhattan, where he had unsuccessfully tried to settle his debts. Upon arriving home, he fell deeply ill and spent the last days of his life delirious in bed, while at his feet, a 12-year-old Herman Melville listened intently. The Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán, based in Barcelona for more than two decades, recreates in his latest novel, Melvill, that episode that would eventually become key in the life of the author of Moby Dick and Bartleby, the Scrivener.

Fresán goes back to Melville's story to talk about his old obsessions as an author: memory, time, the relationships between fathers and sons, and the sublime secret of literary creation. This is a mysterious and torrential book, which escapes all definition because what it seeks is not to enclose itself, but to expand over time, like the reflection of a great white whale on the infinite ocean.

The novel, which has been in bookstores for a few days now, is published by Literatura Random House, and a second edition has already been confirmed. "Even books like mine can connect with the reader," jokes the Argentine. On January 29, it was presented at La Central in Barcelona, alongside fellow writer Laura Fernández.

--- There is a moment in the novel where you say that literature ultimately doesn't matter. After a good handful of published books, why write or keep writing?

--- Because I don't know how to do anything else. This is the only thing I know how to do more or less well… Even tying my shoelaces, I'm quite stupid. There's no plan B, except winning the Euromillions, which is the only thing that could stop me from writing for a while. As long as I can remember, even before I knew how to write or read, I wanted to be a writer. I feel quite privileged to fulfill my primal vocation. When you're a child you want to be Batman or Superman, or play for the national team, or there are even perverse children who want to be presidents or heads of government. I always wanted to be a writer.

--- In Melvill you go from a tiny moment: a father returning home, crossing a frozen river, to the work of a writer as immense as Herman Melville. How does one emerge unscathed from that universe of bibliography, of the author's own work, of imagining an entire life…? Isn't that work obsessive?

---Melville wrote Moby Dick, which is a revolutionary entity on par with Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy. A book that not only gathers what comes before, but also anticipates what comes after. It's a bit like the Beatles. I love Melville's literature, but the challenge for me, in this case, was to fight against my scorpion nature and write a book about Melville's father.

--- You had to leave many things out.

--- What interested me was that nothing should be more epic than that kind of humble and domestic crossing of a frozen river by the father, as he returns home to die in bed. I understood that the real theme was that, small and intimate. I liked working with three clear and true elements: one is the crossing of the river, the other is that little Melville was in bed with his dying and delirious father, and the third is that letter added to the surname, when the father dies, to escape debts. What I would have liked is for the two of them to have crossed the river, because it would have explained many of the author's obsessions. But that didn't happen in reality, and my task as a writer is to make it happen in fiction.

"I write books because I don't know how to do anything else. I have no plan B. The only thing that could stop me from writing for a while would be winning the Euromillions"

--- Yes, and literature allows me to include, even if chronologically impossible, all my fetishes in a book set in the 19th century: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Franco Battiato, It's a Wonderful Life or 2001: A Space Odyssey… It's all in there, even characters from my other books. Because within literature, time is just a game. Nabokov said that time doesn't exist, that it's a consensual perception to know what day it is and what time it is, but time is absurd. I'm very surprised by how people talk about the great monuments of the realistic novel, like Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. Those books are the most unreal thing that exists. The idea that the plot of a life is organized so dramatically, with such clear arcs… that's not realistic at all. What we understand as reality, or what we perceive as the flow of a life, is something much more spasmodic, intermittent, unpredictable, inconstant, narratively incoherent, and illogical. Or even boring. What is realistic is life, not novels.

—You've said sometimes that all your work is a work in progress. That your novels don't end.

—I always like to use the same image: they are different rooms or places in a house where I turn the light on or off, entering and exiting. That's why there are different characters that appear in different works of mine.

"What is realistic is life, not novels"

—I always think about my childhood; it's a theme present in all my books. Childhood is the place where everything happened to me for the first time, and surely in the most radioactive way possible. That's in my books, but also the mystery of vocation. And for some time now, since I have a son, there's my vision as a father: I'm interested in the paternal-filial blood ties, in knowing how parents rewrite their children and children rewrite their parents. And they correct them. And also how children change parents and how parents change children.

—I'm interested in that sentimental inheritance you hint at in the book. The inherited pain.

—Being a father, you understand everything anew. But this is a matter that is everywhere. Look no further than the Bible. Few relationships are more complicated than that of Jehovah with Jesus Christ, where the latter ends up saying, Father, why have you forsaken me? And that is something a son can say to a father, but also a father to a son.

—Already in your first book of short stories (Historia argentina, Anagrama, 1993) you said that everything can be told in several ways, and that the universe is not an indivisible 'whole'. What importance does the place from which a writer decides to look have for you?

—That's the most fun part of writing. Style ends up being configured from mistakes. We tend to think that a writer's style is something they search, search, search and finally find, but style is the result of a quantity of mistakes that end up looking like successes. I suppose there are writers who think that style is something else, something much more scientific and precise. There are those who don't sit down to write until they have everything perfectly clear in their head, but I am not that kind of writer. I am more a reader who writes than a writer who reads. I refuse to lose my condition as a reader even with myself, because I like to surprise myself while I'm writing. Why does this character arrive here or come from there? I, for example, didn't know that in my book Allan Melvill was going to end up in Venice with a tribe of phantasmagorical vampires.

—At one point you say that not only what is written matters, but also what is not written. The same happens in life: we are what we are not only because of what has happened to us, but because of what could have happened.

—Surely yes. And that happens to everyone, also to a dentist or a baker, not just a writer. Perhaps if you are a writer you think more about that idea, since you can imagine yourself as if you were a protagonist character in your life, who also crosses paths with protagonist characters in other lives. Nabokov said that reality is overrated. You don't have to think much about all this. We all live in a reality that we have assumed as true so as not to go crazy.

"We all live in a reality that we have assumed as true so as not to go crazy"

—One must be careful because you can end up like Don Quixote or Madame Bovary; the temptation to novelize oneself must be handled with a certain caution and moderation. But, for example, when Melvill(e)'s family decides to add an "e" at the end of the surname to escape debts, they are merely rewriting their history or their life.

—In your previous work, a trilogy totaling 2001 pages (The Invented Part, The Dreamed Part, The Remembered Part), you talked about a character who had stopped writing. Now you publish this novel, precisely about an author, Melville, who stopped writing for a long time. What interests you about literary silence?

—It is still something fascinating. Any kind of renunciation is an action full of occurrence. There is no more dramatic or powerful gesture than stopping doing something. Not doing something is more impactful than doing it. My previous work and this one are opposite and complementary, because the trilogy is like a gigantic universe that becomes tiny and ends in a final, domestic and familiar gesture, like someone going to pick up a child from school, a gesture without epic. And this new book is the opposite path: it starts from a very peculiar and small moment, like crossing a frozen river, and ends up encompassing not only Melvill's life and work, but his cosmogonic idea of time and history.

"This work ends up encompassing not only Melvill's life and work, but his cosmogonic idea of time and history"

—I really like a quote from Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five, where he talks about books that are "transformational." Books that have no beginning, no middle, and no end; that are a succession of wonderful moments all happening at the same time. I like to think that I am a writer like that: transformational. Or extraterrestrial. If you force me to ask for a passport, that's it: extraterrestrial.

—Do all writers look for the same things?

—Nowadays everyone is a writer, because everyone tells and lies about their life on social media. That is also, in a way, being a writer. But every authentic writer seeks solitude. Even before sitting down to write any word, they feel the need to be alone. Reading or thinking are things that need to be done alone. As a writer, one does not seek a generation or a literary group, nor does one even seek a nationality or a stylistic school, because one always reads and writes from solitude.

"Nowadays everyone is a writer, because everyone tells and lies about their life on social media"

—That gratitude is real, I don't lie about that. I only lie in books. Our influences were never exclusively from writers; I'm surprised when people tell me I'm a pop writer. When Jane Austen writes those chapters full of period dances, or Fitzgerald with jazz, or Kerouac with Bebop, or even Borges with tangos, they are being pop of their era. And Melville with all his encyclopedic zeal for what surrounds sailors. It happens that art is also reality. And it would be unbearable if all those songs, movies, or books weren't part of reality, but luckily they are, and there are moments in life when reality is just that: a book, a movie, a song.