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Quim Monzó

A Review of Benzina
Benzina Quim Monzó
Biblioteca mínima
8, Edicions dels Quaderns Crema, Barcelona, 1983

This article is by Maria Campillo. Translation by Graham Thomson.

Benzina is the second novel and the fifth book by Quim Monzó, a writer who enjoys the unconditional admiration of many readers, thanks above all to the last two collections of short stories, Uf, va dir ell and Olivetti, Moulinex, Chaffoteaux et Maury (1978, 1980).

In the context of the Benzina, I would like to touch on two questions that seem important: the generic and what we might call the thematic. With regard to the first, it is worth noting that Monzó has come back to the novel marked, to some extent, by the experience of writing short stories during the last few years, and perhaps for this reason the book suffers from a kind of spinning-out of what we thought of (at one time) as the basic idea or single idea in the structuring of a short story. This technique (first adopted in Self-service and developed and rounded out in the last two collections) served to construct the narrative around a situation or gag 'initial, final or concentrically cumulative' that the author now resolves in the sum of situations less easily engaged than inside the structure 'concentrated and almost always rounded' of his short stories. We shall not take him to task for that, especially when we bear in mind that attempting this in a novel, from a far more mature literary position than he occupied when he wrote L'udol del griso al caire de les clavegueres, can only be to his advantage in terms of his acquisition of new forms and his manipulation of language, something I have always regarded as a particularly attractive feature of this writer.

At the same time, Benzina is the continuation of OlivettiOldeberkoop, at least in a certain thematic sense. That story raises the possibility of overcoming a disturbing reality by means of writing: the re-creation that the central character experiences as a result of transcribing everything that another character says acts as a kind of distancing or transformation of what is taking place in a bar cut off by the snow. In Benzina, taking this a step further, the belief that the codifying of reality by means of the signs that represent it in the different forms known as 'art' is a kind of transformation or adaptation/transcendence of the environment proves deceptive, or at least ambiguous. And it makes no difference here whether it is writing, painting or anything else. Without having lost his taste for describing the 'disturbance of habit in big cities' (p. 128), Quim Monzó has moved from the familiarly everyday to the mythic world of New York artists (and it no longer makes any difference that what has been sold to us as paradise in books and films should be thoroughly everyday for those who live it in situ; let's not get bogged down here in the mechanisms of the stereotype that have kept culture going for centuries). In other words, then, he takes us from the ineffable local 'moderns', inept imitators of the habits of street behaviour, to the creators or co-efficiants of those same habits, to the prototypes of what lies beyond the post-modern.

The stereotype is a resource that Monzó has used to great effect in his 'stories of urban customs' as a means of describing a generation and an era. And he has referred it above all to the cinema with the aim of fashioning a typology of characters (the Innocent, the Deceived, the Murderer, the Girl) somewhere between the model and its 'frequently frustrated' realization. In this way some of the characters in his stories are 'represented', by means of imitation, identification or a mixture of the two, by stereotypes, and converted into fairly plausible neurotics who combine reality, fantasy, the unconscious, dream and myth and circulate, alien to its varied composition and metamorphosis, through a localizable space and time more or less familiar to all of us. In part because they are all of us and in part because, like all of us, they never manage to be, do or say what they want to be, do or say. In Benzina, Monzó hammers the point home, in that on the basis of an out-of-the-ordinary setting (in the immediate sense) he presents what might be the stereotype of reality itself for a sector of the creators of stereotypes (of international artistic fashion). Thus, on a partial reading, the book is a discourse on the difficulty of decoding, or of coding in some other way, an essentially arbitrary, random and absolutely uncontrollable reality. The dual persona Heribert-Humbert's dream about the Hopper painting that opens and closes the book is sufficiently eloquent, in that it is only dream or imagination 'art, then' that can sum disparate elements and create a code with arbitrary qualities different from those of reality, but one that in the last analysis, instead of creating an absolutely separate, uncontaminated world, is influenced in many ways by that reality, because the heterogeneous and aleatory nature of the universe ends up twisting over on itself and exceeding the selected heterogeneity 'only apparently arbitrary' of the Hopper painting. Among other things, because there are always, above and beyond the various alternative artistic codes, inescapable universal (and cultural) orders. Hence the significance of the scene in the bookshop, where Heribert is unhappy with the classification of the books by subject, but in the end accepts the far from evident 'logic' that Hardy and Kafka are under 'literature' and Steinbeck under 'fiction'.

It becomes clear, then, in the author's demythologizing endeavour, that the gods are not really gods, since they recreate on the Olympian scale the world of mortals, and that the liberating act of creation is somehow a fiasco. And even if Humbert represents a more successful possibility than Heribert, they are both part of an overall desacralization that is made apparent in shared scenes, dreams and consequences. Thus one of Monzó's themes, the failed act, is represented in the novel by a series of scenes in which the 'impediment' figures as a basic motif, this being one of the codes of reality, together with the impossibility of transforming 'on the plane of the real' one thing into another. Despite somebody's attempts to switch on all of a house's electrical appliances, it turns out that the cassette-player and the radio can't both be on at once, and although a highly acclaimed painter writes on a picture that a pipe is not a pipe (and there is a sense of comfort in recognizing it), the fact is that, whatever the proverb might say, the name makes the thing, and Hildegarda ceases to be of interest when it turns out that her name is not Hildegarda but Alexandra (as we were told by Trabal, to whom Monzó acknowledges his debt in the remark that a girl who walks in a certain suggestive way can never be called Judith).

The myth of the 'creative I' thus ends up running into the same difficulties as the 'experiential I': the impossibility of transgressing the random order of things and turning existence into something original and tolerable. On the basis of this, Monzó develops a number of his favourite themes: dependence (on the models we create or help to create); the impossibility of action, great or small (see Heribert's crisis and Humbert's notebook); identity, and the repetition of images. Clearly significant here is the end, with Heribert painting himself to infinity, much like the character in one of the stories in Uf, who looks at his own image on closed-circuit television. The figure of Humbert ends up superimposed on that of Heribert, and both of them on that of Hildegarda, and that of Helena on all of them, and that of all the Hs on all the other Hs (including Hopper and Hockney); and the actions and the dreams and pictures of these on those of these others, in the understanding that they are all battling over the virtual possibility of the 'useless gesture'.