Joan-Daniel Bezsonoff

It might well be that autobiography is an impossible genre, compassionately excused by recognition of one’s own human limitations. Writing about oneself? One cannot see the background and figure at the same time. Although many despotic learned folk engage in it, being defendant and judge in the same trial is not very scrupulous. Actor and spectator in one and the same heartbeat? The autobiographical genre can be a white lie, diverting in its more caricaturesque exculpatory temptations (Benvenuto Cellini), elegant in its more beautiful representations (Josep Maria de Sagarra, Josep Pla, Marià Manent, Gaziel, María Zambrano...), vigorous in its less insincere forms (Wittgenstein, Anne Frank, Varlam Shalamov...), and even partially true in its most factitious materialisations (Borges, Aurora Bertrana...). The problem with some autobiographies is, as always, of the literary kind. Which is to say it’s of the aesthetic ilk. Which is to say it’s a moral problem: not having sufficient imaginative mettle to tone up a life that looks stunted, or resorting to ingenious inflation in an attempt to pad out one’s own deeds artificially, or resorting to unseemly narrative sleight of hand, thus breaking the harmony between voice and credibility. In case all this precautionary reserve isn’t enough to spark off suspicions about autobiography, it happens that fleeing from the autobiographical genre always becomes to some extent inevitable anyway since every fictitious modulation also springs from the writer’s ego. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, confesses Gustave Flaubert. Sticking with physical time, Una educació francesa (A French Education) resists being annihilated by expository empiricism and neither does it seek to exceed its own scope but, rather, it is lavish in all the powers of a balanced imagination that reveals the strength of a well-ordered mental universe consisting of readings, sensibilities, introspection, reworking together with the phreatic layers of the self.

Against Boundaries Imposing Ignorance

This book has appeared thanks to the judiciousness of a publisher who was capable of identifying the potentialities of a work that, in some sense, was pre-existing in Bezsonoff’s narrative vigour and in the particular course his life has taken. Josep Maria Muñoz discovered the literary vein in an account of the childhood and youth of one of the big names in the present-day Catalan literary scene. The result is this book, a counterpoint breaking with the Spanish horizon while enriching the frieze of our literature and offering an approximation to some ways of living that are unknown to most citizens of the Catalan-language territories. This is a major conquest since ignorance has afforded yet another kind of armour plating for physical borders guarded by gendarmes and police, or by misleadingly uninhabited sentry boxes staging the myth that, in a political Europe re-founded by the great empire-states, frontiers are a thing of the past. Lubricating and extending the circuits of the linguistic and thematic repertoire of our literature has been another of the great achievements of this book. Another step has been taken against nothingness. Being able to link up, for example, among a great number of writers, one’s readings of Bezsonoff, Joan-Lluís Lluís, Caterina Pascual, Jordi Puntí, Josep Maria Fonalleras, Biel Mesquida, Francesc Serés, Jordi Llavina and Salvador Company kindles a bittersweet sensation: confirming, on the one hand, the marvellous pliability of the language and, on the other, a deplorable obturation of intellectual mechanisms.
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