Jorge Carrión, en Librerías, explica la existencia histórica de la ciudad y sus libros, cuya topografía se puede plasmar en las calles insertas dentro de una biblioteca y los espacios donde existen estas calles también en las estanterías, los escaparates y hasta los lugares más escondidos. Cuando leemos a Borges, especialmente en “La biblioteca de Babel”, nos acercamos a una construcción del universo construida sobre esos hexágonos regulares que se multiplican hacia el infinito. Teniendo en cuenta ambos textos, conversamos con Carrión para determinar si, en el futuro, podremos convivir sin calles que parezcan estanterías o librerías que registren nuestra existencia. De esos lugares donde permanecemos siempre como lectores, de la nueva narrativa que va más allá de lo lineal, los cómics que establecen nuevas conexiones con el autor, y las historias que superan cualquier límite espacial,

Claudia Cavallín: Siempre he ido a las librerías, ahora estamos en la librería Altäir de Barcelona, ​​y las descubrí a través de mi amor por los libros. Ahora que lo pienso, parece que hay una conexión similar entre estos espacios y las ideas de Marc Augé, cuando hace referencia a no-lugares o espacios de anonimato, como aeropuertos, centros comerciales, esos espacios donde no necesitas para decir quien eres Cuando entramos en una librería, ¿somos protagonistas de una experiencia anónima? ¿Están desapareciendo nuestros vínculos internos con los libros y la librería se está convirtiendo, ahora, en una especie de museo?

Jorge Carrión:La ruta es muy compleja. Vamos paso a paso. De hecho, diría que las librerías pueden verse como no-lugares en el sentido de que todas se parecen. Al igual que los aeropuertos, las estaciones de autobuses o los centros comerciales; las librerías tienen un horizonte común de estanterías, una escala humana, una ordenación por temas, por novedad o por orden alfabético, y muchas veces entras en ellas con un café. Eso significa que sientes que estás en un espacio familiar, domesticado y reconocible, pero cuando Marc Augé habla de no-lugares, habla del espacio del anonimato y la no-memoria, y en realidad diría que una librería , si bien tiene una dimensión identificable con los lugares del mundo, tiene también una dimensión muy fuerte de historia, de archivo y de identidad absoluta. Es decir, hay una parte de la librería que reconoces automáticamente y que te hace sentir seguro, en un espacio amigable. Al mismo tiempo, existe otra dimensión que invita al descubrimiento, algo particular. Por ejemplo, estamos en la librería Altäir de Barcelona, ​​que tiene varias particularidades: una es que es un centro de conversación y un lugar de encuentro para viajeros, y lo es desde hace décadas; otra es que forma un oasis en el centro de Barcelona, ​​que ha sido invadido por franquicias, Zara, H&M, etc.; pero sigue siendo un espacio personal, tradicional, un espacio propio. Cuando miras a tu alrededor, te das cuenta de que las estanterías de madera marrón no se parecen a las de casi ninguna otra librería de Barcelona, ​​donde con el tiempo se ha instalado la opción más útil y económica: las estanterías de Ikea. Si te adentras ahora en las librerías, observando los detalles, ves que, por un lado, son espacios de anonimato y estandarización,

CC: Y si nos movemos a un contexto no tan urbano… ¿La realidad virtual está transformando las librerías en una Biblioteca de Babel en línea?

JC: En el contexto de Amazon es cierto que, como abstracción, esta página puede leerse como una Biblioteca de Babel, que contiene todos los libros que se han escrito y todos los libros que quedan por escribir. Incluso hay algo ligado a ese momento en que Borges habla de los libros de la biblioteca, que son parcialmente legibles y parcialmente no legibles. En Amazon hay libros autoeditados que también son parcialmente legibles y parcialmente no legibles, y la pantalla sigue teniendo unos límites muy concretos. Por eso, todavía no hemos encontrado la manera de permitir que alguien, con un simple vistazo, pueda contemplar un panorama completo como los que todavía podemos encontrar en las mesas de nuevos lanzamientos o en las estanterías de las librerías.

CC: En todo caso, ese “Universo que otros llaman Biblioteca” que menciona Borges en “La Biblioteca de Babel” también pierde sus límites, aunque no sean hexágonos borgianos…

JC:Claro, porque la pantalla es ahora el lugar donde podemos encontrar la bibliografía que antes formaba una montaña. Dicho esto, la pantalla es generalmente una superficie, y en ella perdemos niveles, perdemos profundidad. En el libro como objeto físico sucede algo similar a lo que sucedió en el choque entre el reloj tradicional y el reloj digital. El reloj tradicional te dice qué hora es y todas las horas que no. Todos los números están en el círculo de modo que, esencialmente, todos los tiempos están ahí. En el reloj digital, solo vemos los números de la hora que es. Diría que lo mismo ocurre en un libro, o en un periódico de papel, y en un reloj tradicional. Estás enterándote de una noticia, pero estás tocando todas las noticias, o estás leyendo una página y estás en contacto táctil con todo el conjunto.

CC: Así es. Ese reloj digital cada vez más ligero y fácil de consultar es como Twitter. Esta vez la brevedad no es de números y tiempos, sino de palabras. No hay antes, ni después, ni contexto profundo. Entonces, ¿es esto saber, pero sin saber?

JC: Creo que es otra forma de conocer. Es la forma de conocer del collage. Es sacar de contexto, descontextualizar para llegar a un momento de transición en el que un tipo de contexto, que tiene una lógica, una secuencialidad, y que estaba distribuido y ordenado de forma reconocible, se convierte en otro tipo de contexto, muy similar al collage clásico del cubismo o al sistema Windows. De hecho, la navegación de canales tiene muchos años de historia, desde que se inventó el primer control remoto de TV para saltar entre programas, y el sistema Windows también tiene una nueva tradición de ventanas dentro de ventanas.

CC: Returning to the subject of bookshops, we were talking about the cities where they represent added value, and we ended up mentioning Internet networks. Now we might think about libraries, those places where books are not sold, but they can be acquired on loan. This acquisition, again, is taking place much more often online than in spaces or places. There is a fragmentation of the places where we formerly established a direct connection with books. Does this happen in Barcelona?

JC: Not here. In Barcelona, particularly, the network of public libraries is very solid, with many users who have enjoyed books since childhood. Besides books there is music, videos. There is a lot of traffic and a large audience. In fact, in my opinion, the greatest club in this city is not FC Barcelona but the libraries where, for one euro, you can become a member and go to any of them, and you can check out up to eighteen items at a time. And when I say items I’m talking about films, books, comics.

CC: Speaking of comics, let’s touch on another relationship that also exists between the then and the now: the power of the image. Amid the Catalan gothic we find fantastic creatures like manga or the superhero comic. Do you think comics will be recognized as a valuable part of contemporary literature, where words are put forth along with images?

JC: I believe so. We’ve seen this while making our latest comic, Gótico [Gothic], with Sagar. Images had great strength in Europe, which was political, social, and religious, before the coming of the printing press. With printing, access to the written word and reading was gradually democratized, and so images found another path of circulation and another type of power, of impact. Long after that, the emergence of the screen, the television, and later the Internet in the twentieth century had made images central once again in our age. Under this new paradigm, it seems reasonable to me that the comic should take a predominant, essential place; the comic can combine, harmoniously, text and image. If we are living in an age of substitution, in which it seems that the image takes over the place traditionally occupied by the word, it is the comic that can negotiate a happy marriage between images and words. I think comics can now justly occupy a central place. On the other hand, I think we are becoming very mistrustful of the image’s capacity to communicate “truth.”

CC: Exactly. If we think of Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida, the power of images and memory, and the way we remember and assign value to what exists through them, is restricted in certain photographic interpretations, since there are certain realities that exist outside of what we see. When we draw a comic, we connect ourselves to all the power of memory that is transformed into the power of drawn images, a little like what happens when memory is transformed into written texts, right?

JC: Yes, with photograph we have to talk about the collage. That’s it, we already doubt the documentary image, photographs as much as videos; on the other hand, the drawing is honest by nature because it recalls our childhood, when we didn’t know lies or evil. The language of the drawing in comics connects us to our emotional memory, and I think it can communicate truths in a different way, alternative to that of news programs or photojournalism.

CC: Since we’re talking about this way of communicating truths by connecting to emotional memory, let’s return to writing. If we want to keep transmitting a sense of certainty linked to our times, would we have to incorporate a certain quantity of images and illustrations into new media of diffusion, media of communication, and new literary works?

JC: I have ever less trust in generalizations when deciding what are the best strategies to communicate facts, realities, or possible truths. I would say that every human consciousness, every individual reader, in every moment of their life, has a different relationship with media of communication and the way in which present-day reality is consumed. We now live in a moment of rejection of social media, many people are leaving Facebook, for example, a symptom of surfeit, but, at the same time, many people are discovering Facebook. Each individual has their own autonomy as a reader, and it’s best not to generalize about it. For many readers, now is the moment to return to “a single text,” for many others it is only the moment to read images, since every person has their circumstances. What is certain is that we live in a moment when it seems to me that even journalism in comic form is yielding extraordinary fruits, and is moving down a very interesting and valuable path. There is another path, that of computer graphics, and that of the translation of graphics into images; that is, there are many diverse tendencies that I don’t think are mutually exclusive. Each reader is a spectator, a consumer, a user, who finds their own channels and languages and traverses them all.

CC: And are those channels between journalism and literature also being connected? These days, I remember Tom Wolfe with sadness, and the use of personal experiences as ways of seeing what happens, what actually nourishes social networks, along with the power of intrinsic images, like caricatures or comics. Isn’t a third path being opened based on a new channel that compiled all genres of writing? One that brings together both reality and fiction?

JC: Yes, for example, journalism in comic form has a great capacity to bind together distinct languages. A nonfiction comic, or a caricature, makes even the very author represent himself. You eliminate, from the outset, the need to be objective because you are there showing yourself subjectively. After that, you incorporate cartography, maps, the portrait, the sequential narrative. You return to the mechanisms of film in the images, like zoom, traveling shots, etc., and you stick to the capacity to choose the best in every form of expression that takes on strength. For example, with Sagar, when I was writing the script and he was drawing, we would always do the research together, and this dialogue allowed us to show the reality of the poor people who pick up rubbish on the streets of Barcelona and, at the same time, to reflect on this reality. It’s a very old resource, it goes back to the Quixote, but it puts many tools within reach of the comic, allowing it to enrich the narrative of a reality. In the same way, Tom Wolfe, for example, incorporated onomatopoeia into his narrations. Compared with what we’re doing, the comic would be another laboratory, like that of New Journalism, but one that is linked to our age.

CC: So, if reality leads us to interpret certain texts through images, images are even more involved in texts. Have these connections led us to lose originality in certain stories?

JC: During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the canonical TV series were all original, like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, for example. On the other hand, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the majority of these canonical series are literary adaptations. Game of Thrones, House of Cards, and many others have now gone beyond what looked, at first, like the imposition of an autonomous language. Now we have seen what I called a Teleshakespeare, since today we can no longer speak of a pure origin of anything. Narrative purity is now totally nonexistent. What interests me now are the mutations that take place between diverse texts: for example, Gomorra, a book by Roberto Saviano, has since become a stage play with an element of fiction that was like a character writing the scenes as an alter ego of Saviano. Then it became a fiction film, but with nonprofessional authors, since reality and fiction were connected in the same story. I’m very interested in these metamorphoses of narrative materials that circulate in the atmosphere of an age.

CC: Getting back to Librerías, in your writing there is also a connection to the collateral stories of books, like a sort of rhizomes where multiplicity can lead to any point, where the rhizome therefore lacks a center…

JC: That interests me a great deal, especially in relation to what I’ve published. Librerías and Barcelona: Libro de los pasajes [Barcelona: the arcades project] are two works that lack centers. That is, it would have been very easy to transform the book into an autobiography in which I appeared constantly, in the center, but I opted for a structure in which many nodes have as much importance as my own: bookshops, passages, and even certain very interesting inhabitants of these passages, who are more important than I. As there is no protagonist, what’s more, we live in an age in which hierarchies have been fused. There are no more really protagonistic structures, there are rhizomatic connections in which other types of stories and realities of the twenty-first century are inserted. There is a certain horizontality, in the scale of values, of all narratives.

CC: We have horizontality, but we’ve lost linearity. Hypertextual narrative, the new temporal dimension of narration…

JC: That’s right. I try to give my books the structure of a network. Even though I don’t speak directly about hyperlinks in Librerías or Barcelona: Libro de los pasajes, it’s clear that neither book could exist without Google, virtual libraries, and it’s obvious that if Walter Benjamin were writing his Arcades Project today he would do it with Google, where he would have been able to connect to all kinds of roles.

CC: So bookshops would now be places of passage, they could be anywhere, while networks have changed our system of reading and connect us to the brevity of words, but at the same time, to words themselves, by connecting us to them and through them. Are we now seeing a return to writing and reading?

JC: Creo que estamos viviendo un momento posdigital. Llevamos unos años enamorándonos de lo virtual y ahora nos estamos volviendo a conectar con lo material, lo artesanal, lo táctil. Por eso creo que las librerías van a tener mucho futuro, porque vamos a “bailar un tango” con el físico, con los libros, eso va a durar mucho tiempo. La guerra puede estar perdida, pero durante años seguiremos adorando la dimensión física del mundo y todo aquello que no se puede representar virtualmente. Estamos en el fascinante momento de transición entre el antropocentrismo y el codigocentrismo. Hasta que la transición que hemos mencionado se complete en algún momento futuro, el diálogo entre lo material y lo virtual seguirá caracterizándonos como seres humanos.

Traducido por Arthur Dixon