By VALERIE MILES AUG. 12, 2015
Imagine you’re a 60-something Spanish writer with several substantial international prizes under your belt. You’re prone to feeling anxiety and dread come nightfall, and famously decline invitations that keep you out late. But, one day, you receive an invitation to act as an installation piece at Documenta, the quinquennial contemporary-art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. You think, What would a writer like me do in a place like that?
This happened to Enrique Vila-Matas, an experience he writes about in his semi-fictional book “The Illogic of Kassel.” The phone rings, and Enrique, the character in the book, receives a cryptic message on behalf of a Documenta curator, promising to reveal the mystery of the universe if only he could be persuaded to step out for dinner one evening. Enrique takes her up on the offer, though, alas, no cosmic revelation is forthcoming. Instead, a challenge is served: “Here’s an invitation to a Chinese restaurant, we’re asking for art, now let’s see what you make of it.”
What Mr. Vila-Matas made of it, in reality, is “The Illogic of Kassel,” an adventure novel of ideas. He writes in the first person here and, in a performative twist, through two alter egos: a cast of Enriques in different guises, narrating as if through a fuzzy mirror, so that the story is never quite clear. This is an earnest novel, but it’s also rollicking, a passionate defense of literature as an essential element of public life and, more generally, of art in a time of numbers — when the market establishes not just the price but the value of necessary things like art and thought, and also “the hostility of the world toward those necessities.”
For Documenta, Enrique spends a week’s worth of mornings in a Chinese greasy spoon, the Dschingis Khan, on the outskirts of Kassel, a city that was a major source of military weaponry for the Nazis, and leveled by the Allies during the war. Now the city has been turned upside-down by the very art the Third Reich considered “deviant”: petulant, irrational, avant-garde.
Feeling somewhat abashed as he perches on a cushy red sofa like “Freud’s divan in London,” Enrique jots down notes in front of the German and Chinese “clientele,” with a dog-eared “Writer in Residence” sign on his table. Unable to speak either German or Chinese, he applies his own peculiar translating technique to the voices he hears around him. “When you expose yourself to languages you don’t understand,” he writes, “you suddenly imagine you can decipher everything.” These words, snippets of sound devoid of meaning, are like trinkets he can fiddle with and connect at will, contriving his own eccentric interpretations.
When not at the Dschingis Khan, Enrique wanders the Documenta installations, trying to decipher another language — that of art. He opens up to what he sees, letting in what he doesn’t understand. He finds pleasure in thinking itself, surrendering to the seductive pull of creative association.
Enrique’s experience offers him flashes of revelation. “Life is serious, art is joyful,” he says, and that sense of joy carries over to Mr. Vila-Matas’s novel. He strikes a difficult balance between being philosophical and being lighthearted and entertaining — it’s what gives his writing sophistication and panache.
New Directions has published “Kassel” in conjunction with “A Brief History of Portable Literature” (1985), a cult classic that established Mr. Vila-Matas as one of the most original voices of the generation that emerged during Spain’s transition into democracy. (Both novels, in English for the first time, are skillfully translated by Anne McLean: “Kassel” with Anna Milsom, and “A Brief History” with Thomas Bunstead.)
Mr. Vila-Matas’s work is largely conceptual, and it can be an acquired taste. From book to book, he absorbs the reader into a singular territory in which life and literature are a shared enterprise; once you learn the handshake, you’re part of his club. This is why his reputation has been building a cult following with each new book.
The thrill of being someone else, playful insouciance and literary high jinks, engaging the ghosts of artists past as if they were contemporaries in a continuing metafictional conversation — these essential elements thread throughout Mr. Vila-Matas’s body of work, creating an atlas of episodes in the life of a peripatetic writer. The genesis of this can be found in “A Brief History of Portable Literature.”
Here is the fake history of a secret society of real-life artists, writers and oddballs, called Shandies after the 17th-century Irish writer Laurence Sterne’s trickster, Tristram Shandy. (Members include Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe and Man Ray.) They are obsessed with what they call “portable literature,” which is light enough to be carried in a suitcase (modeled on Duchamp’s “Bôite en Valise”), and must be lived in order to be written. They conspire over years and numerous extravagant parties — one happens in a submarine-cum-Chinese restaurant — to get to the bottom of this thing called literature.
“Art intensifies the feeling of being alive,” Mr. Vila-Matas writes in “The Illogic of Kassel.” Wandering through Documenta’s installations, he plots the map of an awakening — his own. Each experience turns narrative time, the telling of the story, into the space of art — which is to say, this book — where the zing of the visual imagination is captured on the page. “In time you could only be yourself,” he writes, “while in space you could become someone else.”
Art begins altering his way of being; he turns to prowling by night, gripped by the installations, and snoozing by day on the red divan — dreaming instead of writing. The French artist Pierre Huyghe’s installation “Untilled” becomes his paradise found. It’s an area of uncultivated land, rotting compost and stagnant water, where a reclining woman’s beehive head suggests the swarm mentality. Enrique spends the night there, outdoors, in the subversive shadows of art. “Blessed is the morning,” he writes, when the sun finally rises. “The world seemed new again.”
Experiencing the avant-garde brings a renewal of Enriques’s artistic vows, a digging-in-of-the-heels against a world in which the market would appropriate even the most intimate spaces of our imagination.
A bildungsroman at 60-something? Why not? Kassel, Mr. Vila-Matas writes, brought an “unexpected shift of gears.” He writes optimistically about both the future of art and of life, but he has no optimism about “the world,” which “I’d already given up for lost.” Performing at Kassel may not have revealed the mystery of the universe, but it did produce this beguiling, rebellious sojourn into the underground soul of the avant-garde; for “life is not what we lead,” Mr. Vila-Matas writes, “but what we invent in our heads.”
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