Bartleby y compañía es una audaz, gozosa convergencia de ideas y estados de ánimo acerca de la literatura. Novela con tintes de ensayo que se aventura en la reflexión acerca de la fuerza que palpita en la literatura, así como las razones por las que muchos autores, a la manera del copista Bartleby de Herman Melville, han decidido renunciar a la escritura.
Vila-Matas recurre a un gris oficinista obsesionado con la temática del No para explorar la imposiblidad de la escritura, aunque la sola recuperación de ideas al respecto las resignifica en un nuevo tiempo y contexto.
“Es maravilloso el no porque es un centro vacío, pero siempre fructífero” (Herman Melville).
Enrique Vila-Matas, que ya había mostrado su capacidad para abordar de manera totalmente distinta cada una de sus historias literarias, hace gala de esa virtud camaleónica en Bartleby y compañía para examinar, desbaratar, poner en entredicho la esencia misma de la actividad literaria. Nos ofrece una obra de metaliteratura, en el sentido de hacer literatura acerca de la literatura, donde las dificultades del proceso creativo se convierten en la trama, a la que concurre un regimiento de escritores con opiniones tan encontradas que la obra oscila entre un relato coral y un encendido debate académico.
Así, encontramos autores que han reconocido no tener nada más que decir, otros que han reclamado más (y cada vez más) tiempo para pensar en lo que escribirán, otros más que han decidido disponer de más tiempo pero para vivir. Vila-Matas refiere también casos de escritores que al renunciar a la pluma perdieron sus asideros vitales, de manera que esa decisión los arrojó en un espiral descendente hacia el ostracismo, la demencia e incluso al suicidio.
“Hay algunos hombres misteriosos que no pueden ser sino grandes. ¿Por qué lo son? Ni ellos mismos lo saben […] Tienen en las pupilas una visión terrible que nunca los abandona. Han visto el océano como Homero, el Cáucaso como Esquilo, Roma como Juvenal, el infierno como Dante, el paraíso como Milton, al hombre como Shakespeare. Ebrios de ensoñación e intuición en su avance casi inconsciente sobre las aguas del abismo, han atravesado el rayo extraño de lo ideal, y éste les ha penetrado para siempre. Un pálido sudario de luz les cubre el rostro. El alma les sale por los poros” (Víctor Hugo).
En el abigarrado espectro de autores creado por Vila-Matas, por momentos laberíntico, el flujo de ideas y argumentaciones es deslumbrante, sonoro, como un magnífico, extraño, destellante compendio.
“Escribir también es no hablar. Es callarse. Es aullar sin ruido” (Marguerite Duras).
“La función poética, ese vehemente y solitario ejercicio de combinar palabras que alarmen de aventura a quienes las oigan” (Jorge Luis Borges).
“He intentado inventar nuevas flores, nuevos astros, nuevas carnes, nuevas lenguas. Creí adquirir poderes sobrenaturales. ¡Y ya veis! ¡Debo enterrar mi imaginación y mis recuerdos! Una hermosa gloria de artista y de narrador arrebatada” (Arthur Rimbaud).
“Nunca duermo. Vivo y sueño o, mejor dicho, sueño en vida y sueño al dormir, que también es vida” (Fernando Pessoa).
“Si hacia 1795 hubiese comentado a alguien mi proyecto de escribir, cualquier hombre sensato me habría dicho que escribiera dos horas todos los días, con o sin inspiración. Estas palabras me hubiesen permitido aprovechar los diez años de mi vida que malgasté totalmente aguardando la inspiración” (Henri Bayle, mejor conocido como Stendhal)
“Pero, ¿cómo buscar allí donde se debe, cuando se ignora hasta lo que se busca? Y esto ocurre siempre cuando se compone y se crea. Afortunadamente, extraviándose así, se hace más de un descubrimiento, se hacen encuentros felices” (Joseph Joubert).
En tal compendio de lucidez no podía quedar fuera la ironía:
“Escribir es intentar saber qué escribiríamos si escribiéramos” (Marguerite Duras) [cita que Vila-Matas confesó posteriormente haber inventado].
“Estoy solo, pero no me quejo. El escritor no tiene nada que esperar de los demás. Créanme. ¡Sólo escribe para él! (Julien Gracq).
“El empleo elemental del discurso sirve al reportaje universal del que participan todos los géneros contemporáneos de escritura, excepto la literatura” (Stéphane Mallarmé).
“…porque la mayoría de las personas, en lugar de leer lo mejor que se ha producido en las diferentes épocas, se reduce a leer las últimas novedades, los escritores se reducen al círculo estrecho de las ideas en circulación, y el público se hunde cada vez más profundamente en su propio fango” (Arthur Schopenhauer).
“El público tiene una curiosidad insaciable por conocerlo todo, excepto lo que merece la pena” (Oscar Wilde).
“No he escrito nunca con ánimo de publicar. Lo hice para los amigos, para reírnos, por pitorreo” (Pepín Bello).
“Hace poco un amigo me decía que hoy en día para ser escritor hace falta más fuerza física que imaginación” (Bernardo Atxaga).
“No era Monsieur Teste filósofo ni nada por el estilo. Ni siquiera era literato. Y, gracias a eso, pensaba mucho. Cuanto más se escribe, menos se piensa” (Paul Valéry).
Las reflexiones del propio Enrique Vila-Matas en voz de su personaje no son menos profundas, agudas, inquietantes:
“Yo diría que para Del Giudice escribir es una actividad de alto riesgo […] que la obra escrita está fundada sobre la nada y que un texto, si quiere tener validez, debe abrir nuevos caminos y tratar de decir lo que aún no se ha dicho”.
Su personaje (Marcelo) se vuelca hacia la literatura, se enajena en ella (acaso un alter ego de Vila-Matas):
“La radical soledad de estos últimos días me está convirtiendo en un ser distinto. De todos modos, vivo a gusto mi anomalía, mi desviación, mi monstruosidad del individuo aislado. Encuentro cierto placer en ser arisco, en estafar a la vida, en jugar a adoptar posturas de radical héroe negativo”.
“No me gusta recrearme en las contrariedades, siempre trato de sacarles algún provecho a los contratiempos”.
“Ya que se han perdido todas las ilusiones de una totalidad representable, hay que reinventar nuestros propios modos de representación”.
Los afanes del personaje son los mismos anhelos universales de todo escritor:
“…una fuerza de expresión que dejaría muy atrás cualquier expresión terrena, que atrás dejaría también un lenguaje que debería estar más allá de la maleza de las voces y de todo idioma terreno, un lenguaje que sería más que música, un lenguaje que permitiría al ojo recibir la unidad cognitiva” (Virgilio, según Vila-Matas).
Tanto los aficionados como los amantes de la literatura disfrutarán Bartleby y compañía. Los escritores en ciernes encontrarán en esta obra una fuente de inspiración, reflexión, conocimiento y una que otra cubetada de agua helada. Es una obra rica en estímulos que “alarman de aventura” al lector.
Gerardo Moncada - Otros ángulos ( )

Libro per chi ama la letteratura e vuole perdersi in questo saggio strambo e sbilenco, alla ricerca degli autori del "NO" fra nomi reali e inventati, godibili aneddoti e ancor più piacevoli scenette inventate di sana piana e appiccicate sulla pelle dell'anonima voce narrante (uomo spagnolo con la gobba), per esempio quella dell'incontro con Salinger in tram. Vila-Matas sa sempre come uscire dal convenzionale creando qualcosa di unico. ( )

These phantom books, invisible texts, are the ones that knock at our door one day and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason, they disappear; we open the door and they are no longer there, they have gone. It was undoubtedly a great book, the great book that was inside us, the one we were really destined to write, our book, the very book we shall never be able to write or read now. But that book, let is be clear, exists, it is held in suspension in the history of the art of the No.

We tend to hold aloft those works of literature that are, to put it crudely, too heavy to actually hold aloft. For some reason, literary genius, in our view, denotes extensive creative output: literary genius is Proust writing his seven-volume masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu by lamplight in his cork-lined bedroom; it is Woolf suffering a nervous breakdown after the symphonic jetties of The Waves have sapped every word from her, every ounce of creativity; it is Musil's The Man without Qualities for its examination of artistry, morality, and the social structures that oppress individuals and their relations with others. Hell, literary genius is even Freud's 24-volume complete psychological works, a monumental achievement of groundbreaking thought that continues to influence many disciplines to this day.

But what about the smaller masterpieces? In one of the many vignettes collected in Vila-Matas's literary-critical-cum-novelistic meditation Bartleby & Co., the humpbacked narrator recalls a childhood friend, Pineda, who scoffed literary production, preferring instead to write only the first lines of poems; on occasion, too, he would write a whole verse on cigarette paper, after which he would then smoke his poem literally to ashes. What about the writers who write one novel, and then never produce another work—whether because they have dried up all creative energy in the initial endeavor, whether because they have lost their muse (in whatever form that might take), or just because they have been forced into relative obscurity? As Marguerite Duras observes: "To write ... is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly... To write is to attempt to know what we would write were we to write."

While Vila-Matas names these lesser-known and more marginal writers as Bartlebys, after Melville's fictional scrivener who famously "prefers not to" do anything, he is also quick to point to larger socioeconomic and literary trends that often silence writers of immense promise. (The example of Proust above is one that fits here quite relevantly, as, despite the initial rejection of his work, his social status allowed him to continue carving away at the Recherche, even publishing the first volume himself.) As far as Melville, a writer who has become virtually synonymous with literature-with-a-capital-L, Vila-Matas rightly points out that he suffered obscurity in his own lifetime, eventually forced to take on the same job as his fictional creation to make ends meet: a mere scrivener, a copyist of other people's words.

Because I mentioned Freud and Woolf above, I'm also interested in the ways in which Vila-Matas's project echoes theirs. Before Freud conceptualized the uncanny, the field of aesthetics was largely concerned only with what was beautiful; while Burke and Romantic philosophy began to change this, it's only with Freud and the advent of modernity that we see more artists turning to the grotesque, the horrors, and the ugly aspects that inform our lives and our experiences just as much as do the pleasurable aspects. Similarly, Woolf's call for literature to not ignore the very real topic of illness is one that is very much in line with Vila-Matas's thoughts here: while he does mention illness several times (and, to be clear, by writers who have abandoned writing—or even those who are "writers" but have never written a word—he does not mean those whose lives are cut short by suicide, although he does make three exceptions to this rule), it is less how illness can cut short a writer's productive years than how illness can feature in the works we come to think of as canonical, again aligning his thesis with this trend après Freud.

While Bartleby & Co. is a difficult book to review, it is a project that is so very important, one that makes readers rethink what literary production is, entails, and what it might mean to be "a writer." Do we need thousands of pages to have been produced in order to name someone "a writer," or is the person who never sets down his or her thoughts—or else abandons a writing career after one or two successful (or not) texts—as much "a writer" by right?

Poetry unwritten, but lived in the mind: a beautiful ending for someone who ceases to write.

What constitutes the writing life: the output or the intellectual framework and thought patterns that often inform, and sometimes do not inform, this output? As Jaime Gil de Biedma writes: "I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem."

In making his case for "a literature of the No," Vila-Matas is concerned both with Bartlebyan writers who would "prefer not to" writer, for whatever reason, and also with the intersecting matrices within and by which literature is inspired, produced, and eventually disseminated. A personal yet philosophical inquiry into the underbelly of literature, and one that questions canonical assumptions and often flips them on their categorical heads, Bartleby & Co. is a text that all writers should read, but also all readers: not only will Vila-Matas cause you to jot down names of unfamiliar writers on nearly every page of his text (although not all, as most do not exist except "in suspension in the history of the art of the No"), but he will also cause you to question rigorously just what "literature" is in the first place, and what we mean when we call someone "a writer." In fact, in quoting from Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Riberyo's The Temptation of Failure, Vila-Matas seems to agree that we all are:

We all have a book, possibly a great book, but in the tumult of our inner lives it rarely emerges or is so fleeting that we don't have time to pin it down.

( )

Este libro habla del mal endémico de las letras contemporáneas, de los que dejan de escribir (Rulfo, Rimbaud, Salinger, etc.) e indaga en los motivos de cada uno para preferir no hacerlo. Los bartlebys son esos seres en los que habita una profunda negación del mundo. Toman su nombre del escribiente Bartleby, oficinista de un relato de Herman Melville que, cuando se le encargaba un trabajo o se le pedía que contara algo sobre su vida, respondía siempre: Preferiría no hacerlo.

High-concept literature like this provides so much pure pleasure that it's a real shame that a sequel would be inappropriate. Taking its title and central inspiration from Melville's immortal scrivener who would "prefer not to", this is an "anti-novel" in the form of 86 footnotes about writers who would also prefer not to, who possess the capability to write and create but choose instead to refrain. Channeling Kafka, Pessoa, Borges, Beckett, Salinger, and many more, Vila-Matas provides an oddly hopeful exploration of the various motivations that writers use to avoid practicing their craft, from seclusion to despair, exhaustion, and suicide. Yet as this novel is itself an act of creation, Vila-Matas shows that even the lengthiest list of Nos can still somehow add up to a Yes.

For such an insular and self-referential book, a "secondary" work of art if you will, it stands in its own right by the fascinating way that the protagonist, an idle, hunchbacked copyist who's no good with women, takes Melville's celebrated anti-hero as his guide, blending the noble refusal of his namesake with Pessoa's heteronym Bernardo Soares' disdain for the mundane. Structurally, the division into footnotes immediately brings The Book of Disquiet to mind, and the explorations of the negative sideroads that the mind's wandering can take definitely recall Pessoa. That hesitancy to fully engage with the world, the retreat into introspection and fantasy, the negation of the vital impulse of creation - I think that side of art is, paradoxically, artistically underexplored. We venerate artists for their finished works and mourn them for their unfinished ones, but what about the ones they never even begin? As the narrator says:

"These phantom books, invisible texts, are the ones that knock at our door one day and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason, they disappear; we open the door and they are no longer there, they have gone. It was undoubtedly a great book, the great book that was inside us, the one we were really destined to write, our book, the very book we shall never be able to write or read now. But that book, let it be clear, exists, it is held in suspension in the history of the art of the No."

Of course, this is the sort of thing that only plays in literature - imagine compiling a cookbook for the Chefs of the No, or dedicating a symphony to composers who'd stopped writing. Are novels somehow more "artistically pure" than a pastiche commemorating the exhausted Painters of the No? And, somewhat surprisingly, Stanislaw Lem is missing from the lengthy list of authors Vila-Matas conscripts as members of the army of the No. His pseudoepigraphic A Perfect Vacuum contains "Rien du tout, ou la consequence", which translates to "Nothing, or the consequence", and purports to be a review of an imaginary novel constructed entirely of negations, such as the opening "The train did not arrive. He did not come." Given that Lem's artistic goals dovetail with Vila-Matas', he would seem a natural fit, but perhaps an omission from a list is just as significant as being on it, particularly in this case.

Vila-Matas' excursion is a quick read, over all too soon. There are many funny vignettes, such as the one about man who was convinced that José Saramago was stealing his ideas, and who became a "living character" from one of his novels as a form of protest. The protagonist's biographical sections are poignant, especially in section 57, when he discusses his past personal associations with a blocked artist schoolfriend who wrote poems that never went past the first line. Despite, or maybe because of the subject matter, it's inspiring to read a novel that boldly states its premise up front and then delivers, in words reminiscent of Miles Davis' famous statement that if he knew the jazz of the future, he'd play it:

"Only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the writing of the future appear. But what will this literature be like? Not long ago a work colleague, somewhat maliciously, put this question to me. "I don't know," I said. "If I knew, I'd write it myself."" ( )