The public met Rodrigo Cortes for cinema, but for some time now that activity and literature have gone almost hand in hand in his career. After novels, stories and a book that cannot be classified as VerbatimCortés finalizes the premiere of his next film, Exhaustwhile publishing telluric tales, a collection of stories that start from the earth to look for different forms that deviate from reality. With him we talked about how to write stories, the difference between writing for cinema or literature, and he recommended books that change the rules.
Rodrigo Cortés: interview and recommended books
In telluric tales, Cortés recovers a format that he holds in high esteem. “It’s funny because we all talk about the preference in sales of the novel over the story, which is a fact, but we have all read many stories by authors we love,” he argues. “In a certain sense, it is almost the natural or primal form of literature since a story is told around fire. It’s hard not to think of Salinger or Kafka or Cheever or whoever. There is a highly respected story-telling tradition in Cortázar, for example. But for some reason, in fact, the novel seems to work better in stores, as if many people preferred to hug the characters and follow their journey for a long time.”
telluric tales
Rodrigo Cortés and Rodrigo Cortés
Random House
See file
In any case, the story has its own rules. “Cortázar said that a novel is like a tree that branches and expands, which allows digression, while the story is more like a sphere that opens and closes on itself. But it is a statement as debatable as any other, because nothing can be spoken in marble and there are also stories that expand and branch and very precise and self-contained novels,” he says. Cortés approaches his writing “with all the freedom in the world and I try to question myself very little at the first impulse. Yes, in the reworking, in the rewriting, in the revision. So I very sportingly welcome ideas and images that come, and I begin to shape that energy as I go. It is true that the story forces you to begin in media res, in some way inferring what has happened before, and allows you to abandon something at a certain moment, allowing the reader to conclude the narrative. But you can also do that in a movie, you can do it in a novel. You start where you want, you end where you want… On the other hand, part of writing is precisely that, long or short: giving life to what you narrate or discover, but allowing the capacity for evocation, resonance and suggestion, and that the work is always completed by the reader in his or her head.”
Stories without morals
In Telluric Tales, says Cortés, “there are stories of many flavors, but it is an album, they are not great hits. It is not an urgent arrangement of texts taken from the drawer, but rather it is one of those albums with fast songs and slow songs, long songs and simple songs, but that respond to a sound criterion, a vibration, a musical production. So there are cruel ones, there are funny ones, there are poetic ones, there are luminously sad ones, and often a combination of many of these flavors or extensions. There are very long stories, like Snake People or Brooke House, very small stories that try to condense a large amount, sometimes almost entire lives, into a handful of lines. But they are actually united by that tellurism of the story, that semi-magical adjective that refers to the essential power of the Earth. That invisible vibration that affects the inhabitants of an environment and that follows rules that predate man. That’s why they are almost fantastic stories or barely realistic stories, or barely magical stories, because no matter how much they sometimes take flight, there is always an anchor that roots them firmly to the ground.”
Human beings demand answers, but they also often feel disappointed in the answers.
What he warns that the reader will not find in Telluric Tales is morals. “The human being, the reader, the viewer demands answers and feels satisfied with the answers, but he also often feels disappointed with the answers,” she argues. “We all want to know how a magician did it so as not to know, because the moment we know, we say ‘just like that’ and we feel immediately disappointed. Therefore, if that first impulse of the viewer or reader is satisfied too much, as is done so often and perhaps more than ever, at the same time you begin to kill a lot of possibilities that could remain echoing in your head and paradoxically not he is more satisfied, he is only more immediately satisfied, but the work ends at that very moment ready to be forgotten at any moment. So among the Telluric Tales there are undoubtedly fables, but none have a moral. There is not a single lesson to be given, none has a univocal meaning, there is not a single recommendation and the reader can make do exactly as he wants.
Writing for the page and for the cinema
Anyone who has closely followed Cortés’ career will know that his cinema and his literature are very different. “In my head there is no possible camera without a pen or a pen without a camera, they are two languages that I love, but I do not confuse, they are very different and I try to exploit them and stretch and compress them, seeking their limits to their maximum consequences,” he says. “So in film, for example, I try not to do simple coverage from different points of view with a camera so that later an editor takes charge of all that and gives it a certain order, but there is a commitment to language, by the language of the camera, by the cut, by the sound, by the music… The same thing happens with literature in a very different way.”
“Many books are false scripts sprinkled with adjectives and that have a narrative and plot vocation that would be very applicable to cinema, but what we call literature often responds to other patterns and codes,” he continues. “It is not so much the art of action as that of evocation, that of resonance, that of the sensoriality of language itself. It’s not so much what happens to someone as what that someone does with what happens to them. How he digests it, how he processes it, how he returns it to the world in the form of a look. This means that, effectively, my novels or stories are difficult to adapt to cinema and that the films I have made could probably only be a novel in very simple and narrative and unliterary terms.
Rodrigo Cortés and the books that change the rules
The Ebony Tower
John Fowles
Impediment
See file
A super gifted writer, a sensational writer, little read now, little republished, although he had a lot of prestige and fame at the time. Author of The Magician, for example, of The Collector. But in this book of stories there is a kind of access to a revisitation of themes and tropes treated in his work from different angles and it is enormously enjoyable.
I very often mention, because it seems almost inevitable to me, The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Murdoch. A very difficult novel to define, which is almost a ghost story or a semi-detective plot, a novel about chance or about the relationship of supposedly cultured but deeply fatuous English characters, in which finally there is the interference of a world that did not seem raised in the novel and that changes the rules of everything. It is a fascinating experience and surely one of the most fascinating reading experiences I have ever had as a reader.
Complete stories
James Salter
Foam Pages Editorial
See file
Any good collection of Kafka stories. Foam Pages, I just did a complete story page recently, to name one. There is more and it is difficult for me to present Kafka and say something that has not already been said about him in the form of anguish and vital weight. But little attention is paid to the irony in Kafka, to that way of turning the world upside down from a resignation that, analyzed from the proper point of view, is almost funny and that once again travels through sometimes semi-fantastic worlds, which are not those that correspond to reality in theory but to the truths of reality that are stated in a very powerful way.
Merlin and family
Alvaro Cunqueiro
Editions 98
See file
Cunqueiro has that exquisite prose with sometimes seemingly endless subordinate clauses, but loaded with enjoyable, palatable poetry. And with that magic and that Galician poetry that is very grounded and that makes it perfectly possible anywhere. I think of Cunqueiro, as I can think of Wenceslao or Valle or other Galicians who for some reason access magic in that simple way.
