Discurso de Carlos Fuentes, Premio Cervantes 1987

Don Carlos Fuentes, Majesties, has the floor. If this award that honors me so much and I appreciate so much is considered the prize of awards for a writer of our language, it is because like no other it is a shared award, I share the Cervantes Award in the first place. with my homeland Mexico homeland of my blood but also of my imagination often conflictive often contradictory but always passionate about the land of my parents Mexico is my heritage but not my indifference the culture that gives meaning and continuity to us Mexicans is something that I have wanted to earn every day in tension and not in rest, my first passport, that of a citizen of Mexico.

I have had to earn it not with the pessimism of silence but with the optimism of criticism. I have had no more weapons to do so than those of the writer, the imagination. and the language is these are these two stamps of my second passport that lead me to share this award with the writers who think and write in Spanish the literary culture of my country is incomprehensible outside the linguistic universe that unites us Peruvians and Venezuelans Puerto Ricans and Argentinians, Spaniards and Mexicans, the degree to which a set of moral and erotic religious traditions on political, economic and social situations unites us or separates us can be discussed, but the common ground of our encounters and disagreements is the strongest league of our probable community. language the instrument once said william butler yeats of our debate with others which is rhetoric but also of the debate with ourselves which is poetry debate with others debate with ourselves we are ready so let four years pass to celebrate the five centuries of a disturbing date 1492 we are going to discuss a lot about the very way of naming it discovery as indicated by customs or encounter as granted by the commitment invention of America as suggested by the Mexican historian Edmundo or Gorman desire for America as longing for the European renaissance hungry for two incompatible objectives utopia and space or imagination of America as its writers of all times have said from Bernal Díaz del Castillo to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Gabriel García Márquez the five centuries that go from that 92 to this one also begin with the publication of the first grammar of the castilian language by antonio de nebrija and although nebrija designates the language as a companion of the empire today we recognize the other side of the celebration and this is the criticism the language of the conquest was also that of the counter-conquest and without the language of the colony would not have the language of independence I speak of a language shared with my homeland with my culture and with its writers I want to go further however this language of ours is increasingly becoming a universal language spoken read sung thought and dreamed of a growing number of people, almost 350 million, making it the fourth linguistic group in the world.

Only in the United States of America, its Spanish speakers will transform that great country, just after the year 2000, into the second Spanish-speaking nation in the world. This means that in the century that is coming, the Spanish language will be the predominant language of the Americas, the South, the Central and the North, Rubén Darío's famous question, so many millions will speak English, it will be the end answered, they will not speak Spanish, our political, moral, economic imagination has to be up to date. height of our verbal imagination this language our language of wonders and reciprocal discoveries language of celebration but also of criticism mutant language that one day is that of Saint John of the Cross and the next that of Fray gerund of campazas and whoever is next phoenix language flies on clarion wings, this language of ours, declared prematurely dead a thousand times before being reborn forever from the great Nicaraguan Rubén Darío in a constellation of transatlantic correspondences, has been all this because it has been a mirror of insufficiencies but also water of the ice desire of triumphs and crystal of doubts rock of permanent culture continues in the midst of the storms that have taken so many political islands adrift fragile glass our language but a wide window also thanks to which we have refuge and compensation as well as vision and awareness of the times it is simply the universal language the imperial language of nebrija has become something better the universal language of jorge luís borges and pablo neruda of julio cortázar and octavio paz- literature or Hispanic origin has found a world passport and translated into foreign languages has an increasing number of readers because this has happened not because of a simple numerical factor but because the Hispanic world, by virtue of its very contradictions, by virtue of its unresolved conflicts for the sake of its ardent commitments between reality and desire and in the light of the collective memory of our history, which is the history of our plural cultures on our side of the Atlantic, black and mixed-race Indian Europeans, but on this side also Arab and Jewish Christians, has been able to keep in force an entire human repertoire often forgotten and too easily by the triumphalist modernity that has starred between 1992 and this in the visible history of humanity.

Today, that modernity and its promises have entered into crisis, we look around us searching for the invisible reserves of humanity that allow us to renew ourselves without denying ourselves and we find In the community of Spanish language and imagination, two fountains that never run out as soon as we try to locate the point of convergence between the world of Spanish American imagination and language and the universe of imagination and language of contemporary life. forced to stop again and again at the same work and the same author occupying the same verbal territory province of the word insula of desire the province down here with Rocinante is the stain the insula up there with Clavileño is literature the author is Cervantes the work is Don Quixote and the paradox is that from post-Tridentine Spain arise the critical founding language and imagination of modernity that the counter-reformation rejects Daniel Defoe writes Robinson Crusoe with the time of a consonant modernity Miguel de Cervantes writes Don Quixote against time unauthorized by immediate history responding not so much to what is there but to what is needed cndh power or imagination to tell us less about what we see than about what we do not see, about what we ignore more than about what we already know unamuno or He sees the faces of Robinson and Quixote in the English one.

He recognizes a man who creates a civilization on an island. In the Spanish one, a man who goes out to change the world in which he lives. There is this, but something else. Robinson's tradition will also be that of security, the coincidence with the spirit of the time, including a coincidence with the criticism of time but sometimes also the arrogance of naming oneself as the protagonist. Robinson's poetics will be that of the linear realistic narrative, futur and zante logic, populated by beings of flesh. and bone defined by experience Robinson and his descendants read the world Quixote and theirs are read by the world and they know it the quixotic tradition does not disguise its effective genesis it celebrates its characters are not psychological entities but reflective figures not the product of experience but inexperience, they don't care about what they know, but what they don't know, what they don't know yet, they don't take themselves seriously, they admit that their reality is a lie, but that wonderful lie, the novel saves, the trailers tell us, and speaking of Cervantes, it saves the truth. the poetics of the stain and its numerous descendants that the great cuban novelist alejo carpentier evoked here one day before me includes the children of don quixote, tristan sandy, are contemplating their own novel gestation and the fatalist of money jacques offering the reader infinite repertoires of probabilities to their granddaughters the hunt in morlán by jane austen and the emma bovary by gustave flaubert who also believe everything they read to their nephews the rally by dostoevsky the make over the titans and the nazarín by pérez galdós all those who choose the difficult alternative of goodness and for that reason they suffer agony and ridicule and if all of them are descendants of Don Quixote, the case of Saint Paul is also because the madness of God is wiser, the saint tells us, than all the wisdom of men. of Don Quixote and his descendants is a holy madness is the madness of reading his library of books of chivalry is his initial refuge the protection of his supposed madness which consists of attesting to reading but this conviction enters into the duty of updating his readings don quixote goes out to prove the existence of a past age when the world was equal to his words he encounters a present age determined to separate everything he goes out to prove the existence of the written heroes the paladins and knights-errant of the past he finds his own contemporaneity In a fact for the irrefutable Don Quixote, like his heroes, Quixote and Sancho have also been written, they are the first literary characters known to be written while living the adventures that are being written about them.

Colom in the New Earth, Copernicus in the New Heavens, they do not operate a revolution more astonishing than this one of Don Quixote when knowing that a character in the book titled the ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha was written, modern information, the privilege but also the burden of the plural gaze are born at the moment when Sancho tells Don Quixote that what the bachelor Samsón Carrasco said to Sancho we are being written we are being read we are being seen we lack immunity but also loneliness we are surrounded by the gaze of the other we are a project of the other we have not finished our adventure we have not finished our adventure we will not finish it As long as we are objects of the reading of the imagination, perhaps of the desire of others, we will not die, Quixote Sancho, as long as there is a reader who opens our book, definitive passage from oral tradition to printed tradition, Don Quixote, prodigiously culminating his novel novelty, is the first literary character as well. who enters a printing press to see himself in the process of production this happens naturally in barcelona the price of this adventure of don quixote his passport between the times of culture is the instability instability of memory don quixote emerges from a dark village so dark that its even darker its uncertain author does not even remember or does not want to remember the name of the place don quixote inaugurates modern memory with the irony of oblivion everyone knew where troy was and who achille was no one will know who the surveyor of casca is or where is the castle where is prague where is the history instability in second place of the authorship who is the author of Don Quixote a certain

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more versed in misfortunes than in verses a certain de saavedra evoked with admiration for the deeds he accomplished and all for achieving the freedom the arabic historian and hamete benengeli whose papers are poured into the anonymous castilian translator moriscos and who will be the subject of the apocryphal version of avellaneda pierre ménard author of don quixote jorge luís borges author of pierre ménard and consequently instability of the name in third place don quixote in quotes it is just one of the names of Alonso Quijano from chalk esqueixada or quijada and that as soon as he ventures into the pastoral genre he becomes quixotes as soon as he enters the intrigue of the court of the dukes he becomes the don scourge of the Micomicona princess they change name his lovers dulcinea is aldonza his mares rossi before his enemies mambrino becomes a malandrino and even his infinite authors see in gel and we become eggplant unstable memory unstable authorship and nomination search in consequence of the very genre of the visa that tells us I am literature I am a novel but this does not escape insecurity either, inaugurating the modern novel Cervantes tells us this is the genre of all genres and the contamination of all of them with everything when this novel Don Quixote encompasses picaresque and pastoral epic and love Moorish novel and interpolated Byzantine novel and interrupt the indefinition of perfect and closed categories perpetual conflict and contagion of radically modern language Cervantes tells us from the 17th century remember we can forget look we don't know who we are listen we no longer understand each other if the time of the counter-reformation which is yours asks you unity of language Cervantes gives back multiplicity of languages ​​if you want, doubts are returned to you but if modernity demands constant doubt more modern Cervantes than modernity gives back faith in justice and love and demands the minimum of unity that allows us to understand the university itself, Cervantes tells us that there is no living present with a dead past.

Reading it, we men and women of today understand that we create history and that it is our duty to maintain it without our memory, the true name of the past we do not have a living present 1 today and here ours where the past and the future truly in carmen extraordinary look of the disciple of alcalá de henares on his world and ours his is the widest of modernities setback and paradox that perhaps it is not so permanent novel origin of the genre but also destiny of the same Don Quixote is our novel and Cervantes is our contemporary because his aesthetic of instability is that of our own world to the crises then and now Cervantes shows them the path of an openness that turns insecurity into a reason for a constant creation

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tries and invents the potential novel in conflict with itself that is today the novel by italo calvino by milan kundera and juan goytisolo the quixotic invitation is the perpetual invitation to leave ourselves and see ourselvesus and the world as an enigma but also as an unfulfilled possibility the novel to earn the right to criticize the world begins by criticizing itself the question of the work produces the work but if the poetics of the stain is that of the contemporary world it is also that of the new American world since the founding we wonder how the reader of Cervantes who is the author of the new world Colom Elop first made or Vespucci who first named it the gods who fled or the god who brought the anonymous mestizo artisans in our baroque churches or the famous baroque poet forced to remain silent by the authorities and where is the new world in a place in Macondo whose name I do not want to remember in a place in Comala in a place in Canaima in the heights of Machu Picchu those places really exist. certain their names, which means America, to whom does that name belong, which means the new world, how could the sweet Aztec Cuauhnáhuac be transformed into the harsh Spanish Cuernavaca, how to baptize the river, the mountain, the jungle, seen for the first time and above all, and above all, as name the vast human anonymity Indian and Creole mestizo and black of the multiracial culture of the Americas give voice and name to those who do not have it the quixotic adventure does not yet end in the new world remember that there was a civilization of the new world before 1492 and that Although the conquest proposes a new history, the conquered do not renounce theirs.

The memory illuminates the desire and both are reunited in the imagination. Who is the author of the new world? It is all of us, all of us who imagine it incessantly because we know that if our imagination, America, the generic name of the new worlds would cease to exist based on the imagination, the Hispanic Americans of today are trying to fill all the abysses of our history with ideas and with better actions, words and organization in order to create in the new Hispanic world a world new a better reality against the whim of the strongest that is based on fatality in favor of dialogue and coexistence that are based on freedom and giving a specific value to the art of naming and the art of giving voice writers are also citizens Equally concerned about the state of art and the state of the city, we cut what we are in the direction of what we want to be voices in the chorus of a new world in which each culture makes its word heard, ours is said and sometimes even expressed. sweet in Spanish and with it we want to speak to a planet that cannot be limited to two options, two systems, two ideologies but rather belongs to multiple human cultures and its fertile possibilities until now barely expressed, however the speed of technological advances, the growing economic and The instantaneous nature of communications is part of a global dynamic that does not stop to ask anyone, hey, have you already decided what your identity is? 1992 is perhaps our last opportunity to say to ourselves, this is who we are and this is what we will give to the world. this sum of experiences this capacity to update the values ​​of the past so that the future does not lack them this tragic feeling that no ideological recipe ensures happiness or can by itself prevent unhappiness if it is not accompanied by something that we Hispanics know very well the power of art to compensate and complete the historical experience, giving it meaning and converting information into imagination.

It is the choice of La Mancha Cervantes. It is also the choice of Comala Course and that of Santamaría Onetti. We are not alone and we are heading towards the world of the coming century with you Spaniards who are our immediate family we need each other but the world of the future also needs Spain and Spanish America our contribution is unique it is also indispensable there will be no concert without us but first there must be a concert between us to Spain It concerns what happens in Latin America and in Latin America it concerns us what happens in Spain only by needing each other the world will also need us only by imagining each other the world will imagine us the celebration of the quincentennial will be within this spirit a renewed act of faith in the imagination, it is up to us again on both sides of the Atlantic to imagine new worlds because there is no other way to discover them, your majesties, this exceptional honor with which Spain today distinguishes a citizen of Mexico is part of the constant tradition of a constant tradition that precedes us and will prolong the relationship of the writers of the new world with the homeland of Cervantes, I want to highlight a moment in that relationship in which Spain gave me and many Mexicans the best of itself, my country opened its arms to the pilgrim spain in mexico found refuge to heal the wounds of a painful war spanish immigration shared with us some of the most brilliant fruits of the art of poetry music modern philosophy and law of spain many mexicans are what we are and without a doubt we are a little better because we got closer to those pilgrims and they helped us to see better luís buñuel to think better come to hear better adolfo salazar to write better emilio prados luís cernuda and to better conceive the union of language and justice of words and deeds to no one I owe more in this sense than to my old teacher Manuel Pedroso, former rector of the University of Seville, who for my generation at the University of Mexico gave Spanish identity to the study of international law, preparing us to say and defend in the American continent the principles of the law of nations the tradition of suárez and victoria self-determination peaceful solution of disputes non-intervention coexistence of systems I am sure that he would like to know that I remember him here today in another great university, that of Alcalá de Henares and in your presence, sir, because no one like you has done as much to close the historical wounds and to make our Spain whole and generous, and no one more than her majesty the queen has been so attentive to the cultivation of the gentle and profound daily human relationship between our two Homelands Spain and Mexico, thank you then for giving my Mexican and La Mancha passport the seal of your spiritual quality.

Now I open the passport, writer profession, that is, squire of Don Quixote and the Spanish language, not the language of the empire but the language of the imagination of love and justice. language of cervantes language of quixotes