BOOKS AND ARTS NOVEMBER 24, 2008
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A friend was telling me recently about a terrible predicament that she and her family found themselves in. After I'd expressed my shock and concern, and agreed that there was obviously no short-term solution, the only way I could think of cheering her up was by making some vague attempt at humor.
"How awful," I said. "It's as if you'd suddenly become a character in a Dickens novel, and you're not of an age now to cope with all that drama. Or perhaps, worse still, a character in a Balzac novel."
"Yes, a Balzac novel -- all that embezzlement and opprobrium," she said, and chuckled, as if, despite the awfulness of her family's all too real circumstances, she had found some fleeting consolation to think of herself as a protagonist of some 19th-century novel.
So much fiction has rained down on us since Dickens and Balzac that nowadays, whatever your predicament, you can't help but be reminded of a situation you've read about or seen in a movie or on television -- that is, to feel that you've already experienced this problem you're encountering for the first time, even though you've already seen it or read about it.
In a way, almost nothing really surprises us any more, because we're surrounded by worlds in which "everything has happened." One of the children who survived the recent air accident at Barajas International Airport in Madrid kept asking desperately and with understandable impatience: "When is the movie going to end?"
We all asked ourselves a similar question seven years ago when we watched on our television screens as two planes flew into the World Trade Center towers in New York and a third crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. Much the same thing occurs with each new atrocity or catastrophe, whether it's a hurricane, a war, a tsunami or some ruthless settling of scores among drug-dealers.
"This is just like in that movie, in that series, in that comic, in that story," we say.
Our perception of almost everything that happens, even if it doesn't affect us directly, is influenced by that deluge of fictions. It's worrying enough that we allow ourselves to be guided by this deluge, but it's perhaps even more worrying that our leaders -- who have been equally steeped in television and cinema, especially in the days when they were still normal human beings -- should imitate, whether intentionally or not, everything they've seen on the screen or admired in comics (most of them, I fear, do not read books).
What is Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi but a bad and unfunny imitation of the characters played by the actor Alberto Sordi, who, as the Italian journalist Concita de Gregorio has pointed out, combined cynicism and unscrupulousness with servility and unctuousness?
And isn't the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, with his vociferous curses against the United States, the small, fat, childish king who makes appearances in the Tintin and Capitan Trueno adventures? (It's easy to imagine Chavez dressed in a pointed crown and christening robe and baring his barrel chest.)
And isn't Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin the spitting image of the cold-blooded assassin who shoots when the cymbals sound in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film, "The Man Who Knew Too Much"?
Doesn't Sarah Palin, with her spiky bangs, strange glasses and fanatical determination, resemble the KGB spies in films about the Cold War?
Doesn't President Nicolas Sarkozy of France resemble a buskined Mighty Mouse, always ready to fly off to some far-flung corner of the world to solve a problem?
If you keep thinking, you'll see that there are real reasons to be alarmed by this wave of fictional resemblances, because the trouble is, life is very much for real.
(Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa.)
Javier Marias is an award-winning author and columnist based in Madrid, Spain. His work has been translated into 34 languages. His most recent book is the novel Tu Rostro Manana 3: Veneno y Sombra y Adios.
By Javier Marias
11 comments
The MSM including TNR sure does have an obsession with Sarah. You have created quite a caricature of her. I would agree that Sarah was, during the campaign, remarkably effective at exposing Obama for being all rhetoric and no substance (has written two memoirs but not a single piece of memorable legislation) and slammed jumpin' Joe fairly hard during their debate ("You want to wave the white flag of defeat in Iraq"). What is remarkable is the fact that she has been an excellent public servant and a centrist politically in Alaska. Another amazing thing is the fact that she has demonstrated remarkable grace, dignity, and optimism in the face of the most intense media gang-rape in modern campaign history. On the other hand you, TNR, have engaged in this sewer-happy rape-a-thon with a Lord of the Flies abandon. I feel like I have to take a shower after reading your publication. How does it feel to have finally sunk to this level? You are indeed utterly pathetic.
- wnw
November 24, 2008 at 1:47am
Author. Well said. I offer this. The realities of life, are indeed seemingly simulated. The insulation of rhetoric we have experienced recently numbs the brain. BUT the realities of needs prevails daily. We need food, cars, oil, income, savings, freedom that we can identify with, leadership that does in fact lead. The list of realities goes on. Hard facts are hard to come by. It takes EFFORT TO SURVIVE. This is a fact that the USA Electorate forgot in November's election. May we all come to the cold hard facts of reality. We, as an Electorate, messed up badly. end
- ANON
November 24, 2008 at 10:00am
Novels, snovels. Sarah Palin should star in a tricky remake of "Meet John Doe," in which the populist demogogue stooge of the Fat Cats (formerly played by Gary Cooper) turns out to be more villainous then they.
- Alejo
November 24, 2008 at 10:50am
This is a pathetic article that shows how far TNR has slid in their mad dash to stump for ABB, anyone but Bush. It's as if someone decided to write an article insulting Palin and willy-nilly, built sentences around that premise. The election is over. Can you please shut the f* up about how evil Palin and McCain are and how many babies they ate this week? I swear, all Republicans are evil to the core and all Democrats are saintly, people with halos on their head. You really think politicians of either stripe are so different?
- jwl2672
November 24, 2008 at 1:09pm
wnw: What's with this "rape" obsession? And why do Palin's remaining wing-nut crusaders insist on fishing her name out of every article in which she is briefly mentioned, throwing around a few 'MSM's, and teeth-gnashing bitterly how a tawdry side-note to an oafish campaign has been so viciously libeled...I think the fetish is all yours, wnw...
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November 24, 2008 at 1:18pm
Can TNR please translate the word "rubbish" into Spanish and send to the author? Thanks. Sincerely, Bored of pretentious drivel in Ohio.
- JJMV
November 24, 2008 at 1:19pm
No,Javier, you're overlooking your audience. I need to remind you that there are those of us who do not pay attention to popular culture as in movies or TV. I most humbly suggest that you broaden your scope else lose us. Yes, of course popular culture is symptomatic of the lowest common denominator and must be taken into account, but not with the approval you imply. Aim higher, Man.
- moran
November 24, 2008 at 2:09pm
Sarah Palin did what any vp candidate should do.ATTACK the opponent again and again. And, she did it well. The liberal media and moderate republicans saw her as a threat and bashed her. I do not believe we have seen the last of her.
- zorro
November 24, 2008 at 8:03pm
And doesn't Javier Marias sound like someone who reads far too much into movies and comic books and ends up reducing real life to a shallow caricature?
- Gina
November 24, 2008 at 9:12pm
#5 You obviously have never studied "main idea" in grammar school. The whole point of it back then was reading comprehension and choosing via multiple choice, the main idea of the passage. While the author hides the main idea behind name dropping other world prominent people, the main idea (spelled out in the TNR headline: Does Palin Remind You Of A Hollywood Version Of A KGB Spy? There's A Reason For That.) is that Palin is a sneaky surreptitious enemy of all things that we wonderful Americans hold dear. We "fish" her name out of every article? That's like blaming the cop for detecting a bank robbery in progress. Why must you constantly try to defend some ridiculous article maligning Palin unfairly and unnecessarily?
- jwl2672
November 25, 2008 at 3:57pm
I disagree with Javier Salas, novelist to novelist (although I'm certainly not on his qualitative level.) The two great and defining traumatic manmade events of the past decade were 9/11 and the Wall street meltdown. Neither of these was predicted by the scores upon scores upon scores of thriller-writers (myself included; I've published seven) around the world, many ingenious, most up to their withers in research, beavering away like the apocryphal monkeys chained to typewriters. The latter, 'tis claimed, will in time produce Hamlet. The former produced neither Mohammed Atta nor a critically faulty derivatives algorithm engineered by an evil genius. This suggests that it is when life DOES NOT imitate fiction that we are stunned.
- Michael M Thomas
November 26, 2008 at 12:21pm