Joan Esculies: “In the West, we live in fear”

The writer and historian Joan Esculies Serrat. / Photo: courtesy of the author

License Creative Commons

Andreu Navarra

Joan Esculies Serrat (Manresa, 1976) is a historian and writer. As a novelist, he has published L’ocell de la pluja (Premi Ciutat d’Elx de Narrativa, 2002), the collection of eighty-five short stories Tràilers (Premi Mercè Rodoreda de contes i narracions, 2005), Contes bàrbars (2009), and the novels Un veí ben estrany (2025) and La gata (just published, like the two previous titles, by Edicions de 1984).

What led you to start writing biographies? And what led you to start writing fiction?

I have always written—since childhood, in fact—because I see myself first and foremost as a writer. I have always been interested in history, although, for personal reasons, I ended up studying Biology and Journalism. In 2006, I went to London to do a master’s degree in Nationalism. When I returned, I completed a PhD in History. By around 2010, I had already decided that I wanted to devote myself to research and university teaching. I was 34 and needed to make up for lost time in order to build an academic CV and career. From that point on, I continued writing fiction for myself, but began publishing books and articles in history—many of them biographies—with the aim of building up a substantial body of work. Now that I have achieved a degree of stability at the university, the aim is for my fiction to grow and for my non-fiction to ease off.

Armangué had already appeared in an earlier work…

Yes, he appears in La gata in an important but secondary role, and he was one of the two protagonists of Un veí ben estrany. Armangué is a highly educated young man who was told that, with sufficient preparation, he would have a bright future and at least the same opportunities as his parents. Yet, when he reaches his thirties, he realises that this has not come to pass. That frustration leads him to embrace populism, eventually becoming mayor of a town on the outskirts of Barcelona. He is an uncomfortable character, because there are aspects of him that readers who have not lived through similar experiences find difficult to understand. However, those of his generation who have been through it tend to empathise with him quite readily: his fate may be rejected, but his path is entirely understandable.

What are security and freedom? Why did you choose a cat to explore them?

Ten years ago, I reread Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, and it made me think that the path followed by the dog Buck—from being abducted from a house in San Francisco to being taken to the Yukon, in northern Canada, to pull sledges, and then his transformation from a domestic animal into something primitive, wild, and free—no longer speaks to our century. It reflects the expectations of the early twentieth century, when London published the story. But it seemed to me that we, as a Western society, are no longer following that path. Rather, we are moving in the opposite direction: in search of security and order, rather than freedom. Over the past ten years, I have been reworking the story of La gata, and with each passing year this intuition has only been reinforced. In the West, we live in fear, and this is why political discourses that promise security, stability and permanence—against the constant and accelerating change we witness daily—resonate so strongly across broad sections of society.

What is happening in Catalonia today?

During the years of the independence process, a large part of the political leadership and at least half of the population set themselves (legitimate) expectations of overcoming the dramatic economic crisis that began in 2008, the subsequent severe austerity measures, and the historic lack of accommodation of Catalonia’s self-government within Spain. The reasons for the failure of that project have been widely discussed. What matters is that, while much of the leadership and the main drivers of social mobilisation were focused on this issue, more than a million people arrived and changed everything.

The decade of the procés did not bring a single additional euro to address the enormous social, educational and healthcare costs associated with this new immigration, yet its impact has been felt at every level. This, combined with the short-term outlook of both Catalan and Spanish politics, meant that there was no proper planning to deal with it. Today, Catalonia now has a significant segment of the population that is frustrated because its project failed; another segment that does not know what Catalonia is and does not even recognise the names of the streets it walks along; and yet another part of  Catalan society whose inhabitants are Catalan simply by living here, but are not Catalanist in the sense that self-government is of no concern to them, and who live here as they might in Cádiz under a French-style decentralisation that is administrative rather than political. This would take a long time to explain, but overall one could say that present-day Catalonia is patching things up here and there because it cannot afford to tailor a proper suit.

“Overall, one could say that present-day Catalonia is patching things up here and there because it cannot afford to tailor a proper suit” 

Are you writing a kind of Human Comedy of the Vallès?

Not in the grand, Balzacian sense. But it is true that the diptych formed by La gata and Un veí ben estrany seeks to portray the characters who move within this peripheral area of Barcelona. It also does so from a very clearstandpoint: these people are becoming increasingly central to present-day Catalonia. What we understand as the outskirts is increasingly at the very heart of our society—not only in the metropolitan area, but also in inland towns. The arrival of new populations, their interaction with existing communities, and the way these towns are being reshaped could themselves form the basis of another novel.

Did the idea of rewriting The Call of the Wild between Santa Perpètua and Sabadell come from elsewhere, or was it your own?

It was my idea. I have lived in Sabadell for the past six years. Before that, I spent a decade in La Florida, the housing estate in Santa Perpètua de Mogoda that serves as the setting for my novels. As I mentioned, I began writing La gata ten years ago, replacing London’s dog with a cat, which allowed me to explore neighbourhood life in an urban setting more effectively. In the novel, the absolute protagonist is the cat. It is not a book about humans passing an animal from one to another; rather, it is the animal’s life that moves through different spaces inhabited by people, and its passage allows us to get to know them. There are many stories about men and cats, but that is not the case here. While writing it, Armangué emerged, and there came a point at which he became so prominent that the novel ceased to be about the cat and began to revolve around him. So I decided to separate their stories.

In that sense, La gata predates Un veí ben estrany, even though the editorial decision was taken to publish them in reverse order. It does not matter, as they can be read independently, although they complement one another. The first takes Jack London’s story as a reference point and critically dismantles it. Un veí ben estrany draws on The Great Gatsby, in which a neighbour recounts the story of a newcomer. Fitzgerald’s novel is the one I have reread most often.

How do you relate your work as a researcher to your work as a creator?

Fiction allows one to put forward ideas or test hypotheses that historical writing does not permit. That gives you greater creative freedom. At the same time, however, the explanation of the past in historical essays and biographies forms a continuum with novels about contemporary Catalonia. The same applies when I write for the press. Ultimately, I am simply trying to explain where we are.

Prat de la Riba, Ernest Lluch, Fornas, Andreu i Abelló, Tarradellas, Pau Casals, Joan Solé i Pla, Josep Fontbernat, Joan Selves, Artemi Aiguader… Which biography was the most difficult to write? And which of these figures do you feel closest to?

In terms of scale—since it runs to a thousand pages—and because it was the result of a process of more than ten years, beginning with my doctoral thesis, Tarradellas. A Certain Idea of Catalonia was the most demanding. My role as a historian is not to sympathise with the figures I study. Whether they end well or badly is beside the point; what matters is understanding what they did and their motivations. That said, the figure that interests me most is Francesc Macià.

“Going through school or university may equip us with certain tools, but it does not make us more civilised or better people”

Are we civilised?

No. Civilisation, like democracy, is a stage that is never fully attained. It stems from the Enlightenment’s mistaken belief that everyone can be educated and well-read, and that this will lead to a better form of life or coexistence. The facts, however, show that going through school or university may equip us with certain tools, but it does not make us more civilised or better people. Violence and stupidity are intrinsic to human beings. Culture is merely a means of restraining these more primitive impulses, and its reach is, evidently, limited. We see this every day on the news.

Which Catalan writers interest you at the moment?

This won’t reflect particularly well on me: I do not read them. Because of my work as a historian and as a reviewer of non-fiction books in the press, I read essays and biographies, of course, but very little Catalan fiction. I am interested in authors such as Michel Houellebecq and Amélie Nothomb, although they are very different. Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. In fact, I reread a great deal of fiction—Philip Roth above all, John Steinbeck, John Fante, and the whole group of American realist writers, who are my favourites. I mainly read contemporary American literature, whether in the original or in translation.

“At the end of May, I will publish a monograph on Estat Català, Francesc Macià’s party in the 1920s”

What are you currently writing?

At the end of May, I will publish a monograph on Estat Català, Francesc Macià’s party in the 1920s. I am currently finalising it. After that, I have been commissioned to write, for next year, a biography of between two and three hundred pages on President Josep Irla. I also have a fairly advanced detailed study on the events of Prats de Molló. If I finish it, it will be published next year, though I am in no particular hurry. I am also working on the outline of a novel that will be longer than the two I have just published. That should keep me busy for this year and the next. As I said, however, the aim is to publish fewer and fewer works of non-fiction. Increasingly, these serve a purely academic purpose, and for that there is no need to produce so many titles. Most Catalans have enough with the reports published in the press on non-fiction books or based on unpublished research. Engagement with one’s own history tends, for the most part, to stop there. A book of essays or biography in Catalan rarely exceeds a readership of three hundred people who actually read it. Unless they are well-paid commissions, a few pats on the back do not make up for the considerable effort involved in writing them.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons