Toni Sala: “Spoken Catalan will end before literature ends”

An actor famous for portraying a bloodthirsty killer, Malicious, is driving aimlessly while reviewing the text of a monologue, lost in thought, gets distracted, and has an accident from which he is rescued by Vadó, a fat and lonely boy from Puigcerdà, who that same night meets Olga, a nurse who is also fat and obsessed with motherhood. They are the three main characters in Escenaris (L'Altra), the novel with which Toni Sala (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1969) puts an end to six years without publishing fiction.

The culmination of a trilogy of independent books about death.

These are three approaches to the theme in concentric circles: in Els nois (2014), it was a car accident, with a chance component; in Persecució (2019), it was a murder, a plot, and here I can't say what it is, but it's an even more central fact of death. But I don't plan anything in my books; I let myself be carried away by some image, and here I had a very brutal one, a pool full of blood, from which I assembled the book.

He also talks about theater, which leads him to language and literature, and fatphobia, a current topic that affects two characters.

I guess with fatphobia I wanted to touch on the feeling of exclusion and disconnection from reality, how it affects you and how people react.

Many Catalans feel lost and excluded after the Catalan independence process .

These are identity conflicts. The issue of language is very central here. The environment I've encountered while writing is post-procés , in the sense that something that was normalized has become a problem: right now, Catalan identity is a problem, and so is language... It always has been, but now more so.

Loss of tongue "If they could eliminate Catalan, politicians would get rid of a problem."

He ironically claims that Catalan is “a poisoned rat,” “rotten and devastated.”

It's a monologue designed to be uncomfortable, to express this. We writers work with language, the most complete cultural act that exists, and the loss of a language is much worse than the loss of the entire work of Leonardo or Shakespeare. If you lose the language, you lose the culture, and what you really lose is freedom. It's obvious that language is a mess; all the statistics say so, and you only have to listen closely and see how people speak or see how much of a problem it has become for politicians. It always has been, and I have no doubt that all politicians, if they could eliminate Catalan, would remove a problem from their shoulders.

There are those who say they are Catalan without speaking the language...

We could argue about whether they're really Catalan. Language is consciousness, and we express it with words; literature is that. It's interesting that we Catalans still maintain a first-class literature, because it's unusual in a minority language, and it has to do with the link between language and culture, and culture as freedom. It's very easy to change languages, and we haven't done it completely yet, but politicians have completely ignored it. I've experienced with great disappointment the collapse of education, parallel to that of language, because it's what you'll pass on to your children, and it's an act of irresponsibility, infantilization, and comfort. And we maintain the language because we know that without it, we'll be less of ourselves. It sounds very cliché, but having a Marc Ausiàs, a Tirant lo Blanc, or a Ramon Llull is huge. The spoken language will end before literature ends, as already happened with Yiddish.

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Is the solution more literature?

Obviously, more literature means more awareness. In education, literature has been pushed to the back burner, and it's criminal; it's depriving people of awareness. The problem is when you replace literature with books, when you deceive yourself. Is it important for children to read? Perhaps not; perhaps it's much more important for them to have a conversation with an adult, with a teacher, that is elaborate and critical and provokes conflict, than to read any old nonsense. Now they're taking the classics out of high schools and even libraries, where Shakespeare comes out one door and the latest shitty prize of whatever comes in the other. Just like in education, where teachers have gone out one door and screens, machines, and all that have come in the other. It's deliteraturizing. It's terrible and it's leading us to failure, to a Trump and all the things they complain so much about, but for 20 or 30 years they've been selling everything, plundering it, ultimately to control people, for a more comfortable life.

He says that writing is a “drunkenness of conscience.”

I like it when you see the author go off the deep end; it's a delirium, because it allows you to reach places you wouldn't otherwise. The entire book could be understood as several monologues by the same actor. I'm very interested in the connection between prose and theater. I think theater literature is specifically even more literary than novels, short stories, or even poetry, because there's a very obvious connection with the body, and there's no need for all the paraphernalia of searching for a plot.

The actor acts as a mirror for the writer.

Yes, he could be a painter, a writer, or a dancer; as an artist, he's someone who has his own world in his head all day long. In fact, the criticisms he makes of the theater world could be made of the literary world... But if I wanted to be explicit, I would write a denunciatory essay, and that's not my genre. It can be read as a reflection on characters or current events, but in reality, all books are about books, they're about literature, and this one too. The paradox is that when you write, you have to give yourself a margin to lose control, because if not, then you're a machine, you're artificial intelligence. That's why the body is so important. You have to dare to step outside the plot, outside the Netflix series.