In November 2013, the writer Juan Villoro (Mexico City, 1956) read an essay entitled “The enigmatic journey around a work table” at the III Puerto de Ideas Festival, in Valparaíso, Chile. Seven years later this text was included in his book “The utility of desire”, a set of essays on his favorite authors. Last year this marvelous text became a book under the Vinilo Editora label and is entitled “Passion and Condemnation”, a declaration of mea culpa and liberation on the profession of writing, with a prologue by the chronicler Leila Guerriero .
«passion and condemnation» is a short thesis, full of lucidity and enthusiasm, which tries to answer why writers write. What is that impulse that leads you to create parallel realities. In the prologue, Guerriero warns us that what is coming is an essay on “all instances of the art of writing, the entire production chain.” And it is. Villoro, as would be expected, does not begin with the writer facing a blank page. He starts from a general view: how the narrator himself considers his job, what is it that makes his words generate “the illusion of being a private language”. The man who writes is not sure what he wants to create and in that sense “writing is a dalliance towards an unknown goal”, he says.
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The book is made up of six short chapters and full of aphorisms, set phrases. This is already a brand of the Mexican author. Among the many geniuses there are jewels like these: “Words always reveal his private life”; “Art does not depend on the materials but on the way of using that common clay”; “Imagining is a gesture prior to reason.” Villoro weaves from the most innocuous habits to the most crucial ones that a writer considers, not always consciously. His desk, for example, his personal disorder is a precept of creation and it is a dubious space if we start to think that the great stories of exploits and love are born there. Is writing joy or torture? is another question. The author of “The witness” proposes writing as a fight against the text itself that refuses to be written, therefore it needs corrections, erasures and in some cases to be completely redone. “Writing is a complicated way to enjoy,” he says.
There is an exquisite mastery of quotes that make the text more powerful, full of meaning and delve into the complications that writing can bring. Appear Henry James, Sergio Pitol, Thomas Mann, Borges, Don DeLillo, Dickens, Balzac, Bolaño, Carrandre, García Márquez, Martin Amis, Rilke, Capote, Pessoa, Paz, Vila-Matas, Rosa Montero; the names are hidden in the brilliance that Villoro gives to his postulates. Like the one that indicates that failed or bad books are a possibility, for the writer, of inventing a good one, or creating a universe from that failure. In a sense, he asks, “how many weak books do we need to get to “Ulysses”?” The writer is also a pose, writes Villoro, the images created by Bukowski or Salvador Dalí (speaking of art in general) show it, this gives him the opportunity to wonder if bad people can be good writers, or if the conflictive psychological world is a land with more resources for the creator.
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Towards the end of last year, Villoro was recognized with the Gabo Foundation Award for Excellence, created by Gabriel García Márquez. Novelist, chronicler, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, the Mexican is one of the most lucid intellectuals of this century and this book confirms it.
