Jorge Bustos (Madrid, 1982) is the split between the journalist and the writer, the noise of the news and the silence demanded by the craft of writing. He defines himself as "a mixture of Cistercian monk and Wall Street wolf". At the same time as he disembowels lies and political imposture, he needs, and sometimes begs, to forget about it and return to the genuine, everyday reality of ordinary people and concrete things. Tired of fiction and theatre, he set out on foot and set down his footprints in Astonishment and disenchantmentA therapeutic journey, as he explains, a contemplative and reflective look at the daily maelstrom of Spanish politics.
For Bustos, intellectual brilliance cannot be dissociated from moral integrity; a great writer cannot be a scoundrel. Hopeful, he believes that reading makes us better people and that knowledge is a path that perfects us.
-Do you have a very optimistic view of reading, and do you believe that the solution to many problems lies in people reading and becoming educated?
-Yes, and I still think so. What I don't know is whether reading is beginning to be an anachronistic exercise. I cannot conceive of the very existence of Western democracy, culture, humanism, freedom, human rights - the great achievements of civilisation - without reading those who lived before you and have accumulated wisdom. George Steiner feared that the tradition, the teaching handed down from teacher to pupil through reading, was beginning to be lost in the West.
There is no substitute for reading. However good a series or film may be, the kind of intellectual musculature that one exercises when reading is very different. Reading is an act of civilisation without which we become dehumanised. A flabby, pale mind, which does not think clearly, is more easily manipulated and will lack a critical sense.
-In an interview you said that through reading we develop empathy. Is this necessarily so? Paradoxically, the great sin of educated people is vanity.
-This is one of the great dilemmas of the 20th century. The fact that the most cultured nation in Europe committed the greatest genocide in history and reached the depths of horror and mass murder raises the question of whether culture serves to improve people or whether it is perfectly compatible to play Chopin in the morning and in the afternoon kill a couple of Jews in the concentration camp, as in fact it did.
I tend to think that well-metabolised culture, and not understood as a status rank or the entertainment of an elite, transforms the conscience and improves us. Trapiello believes that a great writer, a classic, one of the great giants in the history of thought and universal literature, is at the same time a moral giant. I think it is very difficult to be a complete bastard and write incontestable literary gems. Yes, there are exceptions. Céline is always quoted, who supported the Nazis and wrote Journey to the end of the night. But when you read Dickens, Chekhov or Cervantes, it is difficult not to empathise with certain social causes and to be sensitive to the biographies and vicissitudes of others.
At present, Spanish society is above its political representatives. The best people do not go into politics because they have no incentive: salaries are low and the scrutiny they face is very high.
-Why do you think kindness and a good heart are more important than brilliance? How does that view fit with the following tweet: "I wish for an insultingly intellectually elitist party. Not socially or economically: intellectually. With a sophisticated reformist programme and a discourse of high literature. Let the people say I don't understand and reply: "If you aspire to vote for me, study to deserve it".
-I believe that the aspiration to a cultural and moral elite is not contradictory. Today's politics, not only in Spain, suffers from an obvious problem of elite selection. The people who go into politics today are the tempting refuse of the labour market. Many of them have grown up in their party and have dedicated themselves to training their skills in knifing their opponents; we have examples of insulting mediocrity in all parties across the political spectrum. In the Transition, Spain's political elites were above the average Spanish citizen because the best had gone to build a different and better Spain. Today, on the other hand, Spanish society is above its political representatives. The best do not go into politics because they have no incentive: salaries are low and the scrutiny they face is very high. You sacrifice everything for a vague promise of improving society in a polarised environment. As a result, the untalented rogues go into politics, and those who are really good soon drop out because there is not much to do.
-The worst corruption is not economic corruption, it's the corruption of words," he said in an interview. What specific dangers do you see in the corruption of language?
-When lies are part of the daily life of a country's citizens, everything is corrupted. In non-transparent regimes, public discourse goes one way - in a sense of self-affirmation, triumphalism and euphoria - and the economic and judicial reality of people's lives goes the other. When lies are consolidated, disaffection, abstention and lack of commitment to a country's future increase.
At some point we have become accustomed to the fact that blatant lies are not politically reproached, do not cause resignations or topple ministers. In the drift of blatant cynicism, what matters less is that they steal from you, because what they are usurping is democracy.
Media credibility remains low. Do you think the media and media professionals are self-critical?
It's not that they are self-critical, which they often are, it's that other media criticise other media. The advantage of a public opinion regime - which is enhanced by social media - is that journalists receive immediate feedback from their readers or from other journalists. Rivalry and mutual surveillance between the media benefits the citizen.
On the other hand, there is a perverse notion that is growing in the heat of the noise generated by the digital environment: journalists and politicians are the same thing because they are both on television and famous. The distinction between the two has been blurred. Maybe it has always happened, but they have never been so mixed up. The big media talk show signings are all former ministers or high-ranking politicians. If before it seemed that the press or the media were the springboard to politics, now politics is the springboard to the media, as if the desired destination for politicians was communication and not politics. Politicians, however, are paid to do, not to comment.
My generation and journalism students are stuffed with Anglo-Saxon readings in translation. We can't just read translations, we have to relate to native Spanish writers because they are the ones who give you the secrets of the language and open you up to all the linguistic possibilities.
-I have the feeling that there is a lot of word jugglers who give more importance to form than substance, but very few original and profound thinkers. Do you share this view?
-I'm not sure. I will always be on the side of the one who tries to write with a certain will to style, who strives to offer the reader the best he can - even more so now that you demand his subscription. Paid media are obliged to give their readers the best verbal and stylistic work. I understand what you are saying. Umbral, genius and absolute master of language, did damage to opinion journalism. The writer with a flair for the metaphorical rattle, but with little philosophical or intellectual training, can imitate a style without sewing ideas into that verbal game.
The first thing is the idea, the content, the substance. When you are clear about what you want to convey, the good columnist has to be able to handle the language at will. The bad writer is the one who lets himself be carried away by the sound of the words and ends up writing sentences he had not intended to write. The good columnist masters his own language, he forces the words to say what he wants them to say. I think it is possible to reconcile the aesthetic pleasure of a well-written piece, with rich Spanish, and the intellectual originality that subordinates this richness to the service of an idea.
-He mentions Azorín in the interviews he has given. Why is he so topical?
-Azorin is not current, that's why I mention it, because it is forgotten. Astonishment and disenchantment has two parts: the journey to La Mancha and the one to France. The first is under the stylistic patronage of Azorín, who wrote a route of Don Quixote when he was 32 years old, the same age I was at the time when I did the report. He wrote it with fascinating prose in its apparent simplicity. Simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve. The first temptation for a new writer is to complicate the language too much with a twisted syntax, to accumulate a lot of metaphor and to choose the strangest adjective. As you get older, you realise that writing well is quite the opposite. It consists of choosing, in as few words as possible, the most precise and powerful ones, the ones that make the most sense. In this way, the column has a perfect architecture. This is Camba's case; if you remove a single word, the whole column falls apart. To write well is to know how to choose the verbs. This is what the novice writer who obsesses over adjectives does not know.
Azorín is a true master at choosing sentences with taste and smell. He has an enormous capacity to reach the senses. However, he does not seem to be a writer who has been vindicated; rather, he is kept in the boot of old things. We must turn our eyes to the great Spanish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. My generation and journalism students are stuffed with Anglo-Saxon readings in translation. We can't just read translations, we have to relate to native Spanish writers because they are the ones who give you the secrets of the language and open you up to all the linguistic possibilities.
-Are you aware of current affairs and well-informed, and does it bring you closer to reality?
-Political news is full of fiction. Political communication gurus and politicians are constantly fabricating narratives. The parliamentary chronicle has a lot of theatrical criticism. Political current affairs is a dizzying fever of theatrical actors who project themselves as champions of moral causes; people who present themselves as saviours or revolutionaries. I ended up fed up with fiction, my head was full of lies, and I needed to touch, smell, walk; to get away from politics and recover reality. This is the origin of Astonishment and disenchantmentA journey in which I wanted to meet again with the things themselves. As Pla said, the thirst for concrete things.
This process of reconciliation with reality was therapeutic. Having finished the book, I went back to war. And here we are, dealing with current affairs, their interpretations and impostures. The degree of media exposure to which I am subjected is savage and I don't know if I can bear it for long. I'm not complaining, our job is precarious. I myself know what it's like to be on the unemployment line at Atocha. It has never been easy to make it in journalism and stay on top. However, a part of me tells me that all this is unbearable and that what I have to do is to seclude myself in a convent to write novels. Probably, if I were to seclude myself in a Cistercian monastery, after three months I would end up throwing myself to the lions of Congress asking, please, to be let in. I'm a mixture of Cistercian monk and Wall Street wolf. I love action, I'm good at the frenetic world with a thousand calls, but I also crave silence, solitude and the literature of the classics. So far I haven't gone crazy.