Not long ago I indulged in the frivolity of telling a group of students that you can learn universal literature in one afternoon. A young woman in the group—a fanatic of belles lettres and clandestine author of verses—immediately asked me to be more specific: “When can we come over so you can teach us?” So they came over the following Friday and we talked about literature until six, but we couldn’t get past German romanticism, because they too indulged in a frivolity: leaving to go to a wedding. I told them, of course, that one of the conditions of learning all of literature in one afternoon was not accepting a wedding invitation for the same time, since for getting married and being happy there is much more time available than for learning poetry. It had all started and continued and finished as a joke, but in the end I was left with the same impression as they were: if we hadn’t learned all of literature in three hours, at least we’d gotten a pretty acceptable notion of it without having to read Jean-Paul Sartre.
When you hear a record or read a book that dazzles you, the natural impulse is to look for someone to share it with. This happened to me when I discovered by chance Béla Bartók’s Quintet for String Quartet and Piano, which was not so popular then, and it happened to me again when I heard on the car radio the very beautiful and rare Concerto Gregoriano for Violin and Orchestra by Ottorino Respighi. They were both very difficult to find, and my closest music-loving friends had never heard of them, so I went all over the place trying to find those records so we could listen to them together. Something similar has been happening to me for many years with Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, an entire edition of which I think I’ve bought just to always have enough copies for my friends to take with them. The only condition is that we meet as soon as possible to talk about that beloved book.
Of course, the first thing I explained to my good students was my idea, perhaps too personal and simplistic, of teaching literature. In fact, I have always believed that a good literature course should not be anything more than a guide to the good books that people should read. Each era does not have as many essential books as teachers who enjoy terrorizing their pupils claim, and you can speak of all of them in a single afternoon, as long as nobody has an unavoidable commitment to attend a wedding. Reading these essential books with pleasure and good judgment is another matter for many afternoons of life, but if the students are lucky enough to be able to do so they’ll end up knowing as much about literature as the wisest of their teachers. The next step is more frightening: specialization. And a step farther is the most detestable one a person can take in this life: erudition. But if what students want is to excel at visits, they don’t have to pass through any of these three purgatories, but simply buy the two volumes of a providential work called Mil libros—A Thousand Books. Luis Nueda and Don Antonio Espina wrote it back in 1940, and there, in alphabetical order, are summaries of more than a thousand basic books of universal literature, with their plots and interpretations, and impressive notes on their authors and their times. There are many more books, of course, than the ones I’d need for my afternoon class, but they have the advantage that you don’t have to read them. Nor do you have to be embarrassed: I have those two savior volumes on my desk where I write, I’ve had them for many years, and I have saved myself from grave predicaments in the paradise of intellectuals, and by having them and knowing them I can assure you that those who pontificate at social occasions have them too and use them, as do the newspaper columnists.
Luckily, the books of a lifetime are not so many. Not long ago, the Bogotá magazine Pluma asked a group of writers which books had been most significant for them. They said to name only five, without including the obvious ones, such as the Bible, The Odyssey, or Don Quixote. My final list was this: A Thousand and One Nights, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Moby-Dick, Floresta de lírica española, which is an anthology by Don José Manuel Blecua that reads like a detective novel, and a dictionary of the Spanish language that is not, obviously, that of the Royal Academy. The list is debatable, of course, like all lists, and offers subjects for many hours of conversation, but my reasons are simple and sincere: if I had only read these five books—as well as the obvious ones, of course—I would have read enough to write all that I have written. That is, a list for professional purposes. However, I did not arrive at Moby-Dick by an easy route. At first, I had in its place Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which, to my mind, is a perfect novel, but only for structural reasons, and that aspect was already more than satisfied by Oedipus Rex. Later I thought of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which in my opinion is the best novel ever written in the history of the genre, but actually since it is, it seemed fair to omit it as one of the obvious books. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, whose anarchic structure is one of the most beautiful disasters of literature, instilled me with a mythic impulse that I no doubt needed in order to write.
In any case, the one-afternoon literature course as much as the survey of five books leads one to think, once more, of so many unforgettable works that recent generations have forgotten. Three of them, a little more than twenty years ago, were first rate: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe, and Le Grande Meaulnes by Alain Fournier. I wonder how many of today’s students of literature, even the most diligent, have even taken the trouble to wonder what might be inside these three marginalized books. One has the impression they had a marvelous, though momentary, destiny, like some by Eça de Queiroz and Anatole France, and like Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley, which was a sort of epidemic in the blue years of our adolescence; or like The Goose Man by Jakob Wassermann, which I might owe more to nostalgia than to poetry; or like The Counterfeiters by André Gide, who might have been even falser, even more counterfeit, than their own author suspected. There is only one surprising case in this rest home for retired books, and that’s Hermann Hesse, who was a sort of dazzling explosion when they gave him the Nobel Prize in 1946, and then he plummeted into oblivion. But in recent years his books have been rescued with as much strength as before by a generation that maybe finds in them a metaphysics that corresponds to their own doubts.
Clearly none of this is worrying, but just a salon enigma. The truth is that there shouldn’t be any compulsory books, or books read as penance, and the healthy way is to stop reading on the page when it becomes unbearable. However, for masochists who prefer to carry on in spite of everything, there is a correct formula: put the unreadable books in the bathroom. Maybe several years of good digestion can bring Milton’s Paradise Lost to a happy conclusion.
December 8, 1982, El País, Madrid