A young generation of writers burst onto the scene. literary panorama of Mexicomid-nineties, to become the ‘crack’ movementone of the first narrative manifestations of the 21st century, actually a linguistic experiment and polyphonic that would bring together the new voices of Jorge Volpi (1968), Ignacio Padilla (1968) and Eloy Urroz (1967).
Jorge Volpi publishes ‘Enraged’ (2023) a collection of texts that question that connection between viral and social networks with a intimate and everyday reality which translates as those perfect metaphors of our time. The narrator explored the middle distance in ‘Days of Rage’ (2011) and twelve years later he returns with ‘Enraged’ to his brief writing, to the forms of absolute concretion.
The author states that “a long story is, almost always, a bad story”, and with such a definition, Volpi once again enters a territory where the limits of genres are dynamited and the proposals to establish the concept of brief and its dimensions.
The volume he now publishes turns his statement into a political-social paradoxand paraphrases that if a story is a dictatorshipa novel is anarchyand the middle distance looks like democracyor even to the oligarchy; In reality, it is a world (read, gender) with few laws that are nevertheless respected.
Freedom
It is obvious that in these stories the author feels freer, less tied, agile and comfortable within his broad and deep knowledge of the story space. It delivers stories that move on that diffuse threshold that is unusual in short literature written in Spanish, where “if a narrative concentrates its plot and reduces its number of characters, but has the epic breath of a novel, we could consider it medium distance even if it has twenty or thirty pages.” And that “epic breath, almost incomprehensible, turns a story into something else”, those other things are what the Mexican works with, draws up the record and displays that angry world.
This new installment, the stories, ‘Irreversibility’, ‘Fatality’, ‘Sustainability’, ‘Transparency’, ‘Atonality’ and ‘Poetics’, of titles so charismatic and wide expressive meaningprovoke in the reader a battery of questions that complete the vision of the stories to be told: “what do we understand by the concept of irreversibility?”, or “from what procedure can a person (character) become an irresolvable theorem?”, even “what is destiny and how it conditions our lives?”, and “can a fictional character become the protagonist of a declaration of principles?”
Catalog of rages
We get confused, then, with those questions, we feel mistreated by the inequality that advocate the powers, and for the narrator we breathe the wrath of society. We live angry, and he proposes his stories as if it were a manual of that rage: Volpi dissects, describes and delves coherently into the spaces that generate our contradictions and confronts them in other areas and in the fissures that each of us covers.
The ‘Enrabiados’ collection is an authentic catalog of rages in your version more furious or choleric, suffocating and distressing. One of the characteristics that best defines these last decades is rage, or rather, the different types of rage, some gratuitous and irrational, others understandable and natural.
Our political life has become more and more tense and, if we add to this the rise of networks and in particular of Twitteras a space designed so that everyone can express their anger against others in a discriminatory way, this makes us live in a time dominated by anger in the face of a world that we find more hostile and undesirable.
Volpi starts from inequality to record those rages that derive from the envy or resentmentand are exploited by politicians of all ideologies, but there are legitimate rages against inequality, injustice and impunity that we see every day, and a curiosity about the process of creation that emerges from these stories is a solid reflection on writing and literature, a manual on fiction or on various manifestations such as underground literatureeither black literature in its Mexican context.
Literature focused on literature itself or, as we read, “the eternal dream of literature.” The last of the stories, ‘Poetics’, is a satire of what certain contemporary poetics mean, a mockery of Volpi himself, narrator.
