Guadalupe Nettel gave the fourth Lancaster International Fiction Lecture on Tuesday, October 22, 2024, at 7:30 PM BST, as part of Litfest’s “Autumn Weekend.”

How beautiful and enigmatic is the image of the alchemists who Marguerite Yourcenar and Umberto Eco portrayed as individuals devoted to the task of transforming base metals into gold. Transforming that which is ugly, heavy, even poisonous, used to make guns and shackles, into the metal most prized by human beings, the most luminous, that best represents the brilliance of the sun. All things considered, this was not such a fanciful enterprise. There are many examples in nature of transmutations such as the one the alchemists sought. Mushrooms, for instance, transform rotting stuff into nourishment and purify the earth’s toxicity; trees—and plants in general—convert the carbon dioxide produced by cars into oxygen; and oysters clean the impurities from water, to give just a few examples. Literature, and, I would venture to say, art in general, transforms the innumerable pains that the human experience entails into beauty: the beauty that exists in Lorenzo Bartolini’s sculpture The Inconsolable, in the Song of Songs, in Don Quixote of La Mancha, in the verses of A Season in Hell. But what exactly is this material we are attempting to transform? What is this thing we refer to with the word “pain,” despite the fact that it takes so many different forms? Why is it worth even considering?

Let us begin with physical pain. This is very difficult to represent. In general, we lack the words to speak of this experience: We tend to speak of a dull or an acute pain, a muted pain, one that throbs or shoots, a pain that cripples or one that lies in wait. We speak of a twinge, of a burning, of an irritation on the skin. We scarcely know how to indicate the place where it starts: the arm, the head, the belly? The truth is, we writers lack the vocabulary, just as the sick do when trying to explain to their doctor how they feel, and so, in poetry as in novels, there are very few detailed descriptions of this phenomenon. Joan Didion, who suffered from migraines from childhood, tallies up the visible and invisible symptoms of her torment in a powerful essay titled “In Bed.” “The actual headache, when it comes, brings with it chills, sweating, nausea, and a debility that seems to stretch the very limits of endurance.”¹ The Mexican writer Maria Luisa Puga, too, in her Diary of Pain, makes an uncommon effort to express the constant inflammation in her joints caused by rheumatoid arthritis. For Puga, her pain is a companion that possesses a well-defined personality as well as a particular appearance: “It is unctuous, skinny, dark, and always on the prowl.” The Spanish writer Marta Sanz writes in her autobiographical novel Clavicle: “I describe to the umpteenth doctor the precise place where my pain is. An inexplicable space between my breastbone and my throat. The doctor says: ‘That’s impossible.’ Insistently, I point at a small hollow. I trace circles around it with my index finger. It is a blank space in things, the only region of the body mass where there is absolutely nothing. The doctor crosses the line: ‘If I were to stick a needle in exactly this spot, it would come out clean on the other side.’”² There are many pains afflicting Sanz: public health and its problems, capitalism, the indifference of doctors, work, guilt, fear of old age and decrepitude; and writing, which at times provides company and at others refuses to. All of these are concentrated at an imprecise point on her slender collarbone.

Didion, Puga, and Sanz make one thing clear: There are few experiences as isolating as pain, because no matter the effort we make, it is practically impossible for our interlocutor to understand or imagine what we are undergoing. What’s more, it is difficult to find someone, whether it be a reader, a relative, or a friend, with the disposition to imagine our sensations. Great openness and great empathy are required in order to willingly accept another’s pain. We already have plenty of our own. This is why, most of the time, we do not even trouble to imagine it—our psychological defense mechanisms prevent us from doing so.

In contrast, there is another type of suffering that is less arduous to open ourselves up to: the type we tend to call emotional pain, moral pain, or psychic pain. And not only has this been addressed countless times by those who dedicate themselves to literature, but it is also one of the great driving forces of art, one of its main ingredients or raw materials.

More than twenty years ago, when I was first starting to write and didn’t yet have much of an idea as to what my subjects would be, I read, at the recommendation of a friend, The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly. There I came across a quotation in Pali, which the author translates thus: “Sorrow is everywhere / In man is no abiding entity / In things no abiding reality.” Connolly attributes the phrase to the Buddha and adds: “a dirge that still resounds mournfully in ten thousand monasteries.”³ The quote intrigued me so much that I decided to investigate this philosophy further, and this was how I discovered that it is focused on nothing less than the elimination of suffering. When the Buddha reaches enlightenment and decides to teach others how to do so, he gathers a group of people in the city of Sarnath. This is where he lays down the foundations of his doctrine, known as the Four Noble Truths.

The first of these is “Suffering exists and is all-pervading.” The suffering or pain that Buddhism speaks of (the word in Sanskrit is “duhkha”) is divided into various categories. The first corresponds to a physical and existential pain intrinsic to the human condition—the almost incommunicable pain I mentioned at the beginning. The second corresponds to our reaction to change or loss, whether of things, situations, people, faculties, or possibilities to which we are attached. That is, the suffering caused by the fleeting nature of things, of bonds, of experiences. It is the pain experienced by the teenagers Romeo and Juliet, it is Odysseus’s nostalgia when he recalls Ithaca, but it is also a subject we find in modern novels like The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald or Battles in the Desert, the best-known novel by the Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco, in which he painstakingly enumerates all the streets, cinemas, cars, advertisements, and radio programs that peopled his childhood in Mexico City during the 1950s. After recalling all of this, and chiefly after recalling the narrator’s first love, Pacheco ends this brief, moving novel with these words:

So ancient, so remote, such an impossible story. But Mariana existed, Jim existed, everything existed that I’ve repeated to myself after such a long time refusing to confront it. I’ll never know if the suicide was true. I never again saw Rosales or anybody else from that era. They demolished the school, they demolished Mariana’s building, they demolished my house, and they demolished Colonia Roma. That city ended. That country is finished. There is no memory of the Mexico of those years. And nobody cares: who could feel nostalgia for that horror?⁴

One senses, in the wry comment with which he ends the book, that feeling of solitude and isolation that sweeps over older people when they recall their youth, and which Pacheco also broached in several of his poems. Few Spanish-speaking writers have described as well as he the awareness of what the Buddhists call impermanence and which is none other than tempus fugit, that is, the transitory nature of life and the pain caused by not being able to come to terms with its speed.

The third variant of duhkha that Buddhism refers to describes a very subtle, profound type of suffering, a dissatisfaction that comes with existence itself and which can be glimpsed in humanity’s persistent questions about the meaning of life, the “To be or not to be” of Hamlet, or the aphorisms that Emil Cioran compiles under the intriguing title of The Trouble with Being Born.

Another of Buddhism’s premises is that, except for physical pain, all suffering originates in the mind due to attachment, aversion, and the mistaken ideas we have about who we are. Trying to reject or ignore suffering only makes it more powerful, but so too does the habit of growing too fond of it.

Although a writer’s work is inspired in large part by experiences and a careful observation of the world and our fellow human beings, it is equally inspired by books written by others. There are many authors who have helped me to look at pain head-on, and it would take me far too long to mention all of them here. Andrea Bajani is one of them. His book Se consideri le colpe (If you kept a record of sins) tells of the profound sadness and loneliness experienced by a little boy abandoned by his mother, while Mi riconosci (Do you recognize me?) speaks of the death of his best friend and mentor, the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi. Another of Bajani’s novels, written in the form of a fable and entitled Un bene al mondo (A good in the world), opens like this:

Once upon a time there was a little boy who had a pain that never left him. He carried it with him everywhere. He crossed the fields in the mornings to go to school. When he was in the classroom, the pain would curl up at his feet and for five hours it stayed there, its eyes closed, not breathing. At break time, it went out with the boy and his classmates to the playground, and when the school day finished, the boy crossed the field on the way back home with the pain by his side. It didn’t need a leash because it would never have escaped, and nor did it need a muzzle because it would never have hurt anyone.

There are writers we read because they seem likeable, funny, and interesting, and there are writers we read as we converse with that wise part of ourselves with which we hardly ever come into contact. In this second group I place, for instance, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère. I began to read his book Lives Other Than My Own without knowing what it was about. My father had just been diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer, and reading was one of the ways I distracted myself from the anticipatory grief, almost as excruciating and far more distressing than real grief. The story seemed to be clear: Carrère was in Sri Lanka at the time of the tsunami, the unforgettable images of which we all saw on television. You didn’t need to make much effort to get lost in the plot. Shortly afterward, though, he returned to France and the story changed completely. The subject was no longer the tsunami, but rather the agony of those who spend their lives accompanying a loved one who is sick with cancer. That is, the book spoke of exactly what was happening to me, of the thing I was attempting to distract myself from. Despite what one might think, submerging myself in the story of Juliette and Étienne’s friendship (which is based on the experience of illness, of physical suffering, and of imminent death) did not deepen my anguish; rather, it helped me to understand what was happening to me. It particularly helped me to shift my focus from my own suffering to my father’s, on what he was feeling, on his own distress, on his rage, on the story that had led him to this point. In Carrère’s book, several writers are mentioned, and two of them stayed with me: Swiss novelist Fritz Zorn, whose only book, Mars, speaks of cancer, the author’s own cancer, as the culmination of a family and a personal history, but above all as the consequence of never having allowed himself to express his anger. The other is the psychoanalyst Pierre Cazenave, whose essays on illness as a method of self-knowledge lit my way in my attempts to understand what my father was going through. Emmanuel Carrère quotes a passage from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night in Lives Other Than My Own that sums up his novel’s thesis most eloquently. It reads as follows: “Maybe that’s what we seek our whole lives long, nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow, so that we can become ourselves before we die.”

The death of my father, above all, but also that of other much-beloved people I was close to, taught me that in our moments of greatest pain, the neurotic carapace we tend to barricade ourselves behind disappears, or at least develops cracks, and this gives us the opportunity to establish an intimate contact with others, an exceptional contact. This discovery gave rise to my novel After the Winter, in which four characters go through moments of devastating loss while at the same time discovering the possibility of encountering the other.

If in Buddhism the masters teach through their way of being in the world (one learns by watching them, by the fact of being in their company), in the case of writers this transmission takes place via their books. The thing they transmit is their own perception of the world. What is it that Carrère has taught me to see? Other people, first and foremost. To look at them as he describes them in his books: with empathy, with curiosity, with a desire to understand even the most disturbed and cruel of human beings.

I agree with Amos Oz when he says, in “The Woman in the Window,” that “to read a novel is like being invited into other people’s living rooms, their nurseries, their studies, and even their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams.” Although we might belong to different cultures or different moments in time, human beings are not so different from one another. Literature is a highly subtle code that manages to open, if only for a moment, the most closed-off hearts and minds. It has the power to connect us beyond ideologies, through our most basic emotions such as fear, humiliation, tenderness, suffering, and the compassion that can arise from it. It has the power to nudge us into the intimate sphere of other people and other communities, even enemy communities, as Oz suggests, to make us share in their story, their daily lives, their fears, their desires, their perspectives, their experiences, and, especially, their pain.

It seems to me that one of fiction’s most remarkable qualities is that it allows us access to subjectivity like no other art form. Human beings have a highly intimate relationship with words. We think in words, we dream in words. Words, when well chosen, can allow us to construct images, to express emotions, to name things, and to describe those things that cannot be named.

There are times when books are not only a window, as Oz would have it, but rather are indisputably a portal or a time machine that transports us to other realities, that takes us not only into the house but also the bodies and minds of other people, real or imaginary; in short, they allow us to be others. I, for example, was Gregor Samsa; I was the austere Bernarda Alba, and I was each of her daughters. I was the son of Pedro Páramo, I was Annie Ernaux and felt her peasant girl shame in the classist world of the university, I felt the desire of Humbert Humbert toward a fourteen-year-old girl, I felt the desire of Carmen Maria Machado for a badly behaved Harvard graduate. I was Jean-Claude Romand and knew I had no option but to kill my entire family before they discovered my despicable behavior. Thanks to Gaël Faye, I felt the agony of the Hutu persecution of the Tutsi during the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. Books allow us to be reincarnated, because what is reincarnation if not to live again, in another body, in other circumstances and another time? In books, the memory of humanity is printed. Like the characters in Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night, humans continue to dream of cheating death, of somehow remaining in this ephemeral world, of transferring our consciousness—another of the ambitions attributed to the alchemists. We forget that when writing was invented, we discovered the secret of immortality. This is how we transfer our consciousness into other bodies, and also the most common, simple, quotidian way of communicating with the dead, one that requires no sacrifice in exchange. It is enough to devote a few hours of our time and attention to them, to receive the experience, wisdom, and advice of those who lived before we did in this world. It does not matter if they did so in the last century, in the Renaissance, or in ancient Egypt. Books preserve the history, the wisdom, the incantations, and the sorcery of our ancestors. Is that not a feat of magic more powerful and indisputable even than that which the alchemists sought?

I shall take the liberty of including one little postscript.

Why do you think that, even now, in the twenty-first century, books are being banned? They are banned because they liberate, because they open minds, because they can generate enough empathy to make us break with imposed loyalties to institutions like the army, or to ideologies like nationalism or racism. They are banned because they make us free and because they incite us to subversion. In other words, books are powerful, and to some people this power represents a threat.

The books that I have mentioned here are not always easy to read. Often, when I recommend them to my students or my friends, they say: “Ugh! That’s the last thing I need right now. Can’t you recommend something that will make me laugh?” And then I recall the mathematical formula, “comedy is tragedy plus time.” I think it’s spot-on. Why do we laugh when we recall misfortunes from our past? Precisely because it is possible to transcend pain, but in order to do so we must go through it. Often, the perspective provided by the passage of the years allows us to see that, consciously or unconsciously, we chose this suffering because the experience of pain, whether our own or someone else’s, has a few important advantages. First, it allows us to truly connect with others. “To feel with the other” is the etymological meaning of “compassion,” that word that originally had nothing to do with looking at another pityingly or patronizingly. Second, pain is an uncomfortable yet highly effective way of learning. Neurologists and psychologists know this perfectly well, and I’m not referring only to the pragmatic Ivan Pavlov, who, when he inflicted pain on the animals in his laboratory, managed to increase their intelligence, but also to Carl Gustav Jung, the father of analytical psychology. To conclude, I would like to quote a sentence from Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy, which will, I hope, return to readers the desire to read challenging stories:

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.⁵

^{1. Joan Didion, “In Bed” in The White Album. Essays (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979).↩}

^{2. Marta Sanz, Clavicula (Clavicle) (Barcelona, Editorial Anagrama, 2017).↩}

^{3. Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (London, Viking Press (Compass Books series), 1957, p. 21).↩}

^{4. José Emilio Pacheco, Battles in the Desert, translated from Spanish by Katie Silver (New York, New Directions, 2021).↩}

^{5. Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (2nd edition, London, Routledge, 1980, p. 99).↩}