[This is a really complicated semester, with lots to mark and edit, and pressing personal issues, which explains why I’m being so irregular in my supposedly weekly posting. Apologies!]

Today I’m writing about writers and my parasitical syndrome. You may have heard of impostor syndrome (feeling you’re underqualified for a task you’re doing proficiently) and now I’m inventing this other syndrome to explain how I feel regarding the living professional authors I write about. The post is based on two key moments of this week now ending: one, a visit to my class by Ricard Ruiz Garzón, the other an email exchange with a major US author, whose name I will conceal to respect his privacy (and mine, in a way).

I’ll begin with the visitor. Ricard Ruiz Garzón is a very well-known personality in the Catalan circuit of the fantastic. He is a writer (of fantasy fiction and children’s and YA narrative), a teacher at the prestige creative writing school of the Ateneu in Barcelona, and the organizer of Festival 42 gathering fans and writers of the fantastic the first week of November since 2021. I knew about Ricard before I met him at Barcelona’s Eurocon 2016, and I have kept in touch with him mainly through the Catalan convention on the fantastic, CatCon, and my collaborations at Festival 42. I need to add that Ricard has been active as a journalist specializing in culture for 25 years, during which he has worked tirelessly in most Catalan and Spanish national media. I invited him to class for him to tell students about all these professional experiences and because of his extensive experience as a reviewer (I’m teaching my students to write reviews). Typically, less than half the class attended the session, but that’s a matter for another post.

Ricard is always very forthcoming about his unstable professional situation. He was in the news in 2017, when his landlord decided to suddenly increase his rent and he was forced to cull his impressive library before moving to a cheaper location. He is a classic example of how difficult it is to make ends meet in a fast-shrinking professional cultural sector, which has always been precarious but might soon disappear given the disaffection of the young for traditional media. I do know that teaching my students how to review books professionally makes little sense since there is practically no market for that skill, yet, as Ricard explained, it is important to train persons with solid criteria, even if they end up writing for free for the social networks.

Ricard’s dream, he told me, is to have two years to write in peace and quiet a literary novel for adults. So far, he explains, he has written his more than dozen books, including collaborations with other authors and the edition of diverse short story collections, in fits and starts, combining his work as a writer with many other activities. How, however, does a self-employed cultural activist like him manage to find time for a book? Not even the authors that sell thousands of copies can easily afford that luxury, often seeing their time interrupted by collaborations in the media, and other activities such as book tours, attending festivals and so on.

This is why I told my class that I feel guilty when I meet writers, for I’m a highly privileged tenured teacher with a rather decent salary, a fixed job, and, what is more, time to write. I must clarify that I have time now, when I have been a teacher for more than thirty years and my teaching load is much reduced. I didn’t have that time until about eight years ago, which is why I published mostly articles and chapters instead of books, as I mostly do now. Anyway, I told Ricard before my students about my parasitical syndrome and he generously downplayed it, claiming that he could have chosen to become an academic but discarded that option. We commented on China Miéville’s 2012 proposal that writers should be paid a fixed salary, as a means to compensate for digital piracy, and also on the Finnish government’s grants for writers, but these are impossible options in Catalonia or Spain, which trusts the market laws to keep writers afloat or sink.

The email conversation with the major US writer went in a very different direction. He has been very kind to me in recent years and has not only welcome my academic work on his novels but also allowed me to ask him questions. This time I asked for yet another favour and I mentioned, somewhat imprudently, that I had written yet another piece (a chapter for a handbook on men in fiction) about a famous trilogy of his. This article is far more critical than my previous work on his novels but it seemed somehow disloyal not to mention that it does exist. So, he requested it and I sent it. His next email contained not only the text I had asked him to write for me, but also a rather lengthy comment on my article which, as I found, expressed eventually his view that I ‘don’t get it’. This ‘it’ referred to how authors conceive of characters, and insisted on a point raised in a previous exchange when I complained about this author’s decision to kill off a character and he replied that this was not a decision calculated to facilitate a plot turn but something that happened to the character, as if he were alive.

My reply, so far the last message in the exchange (which I hope will continue), was a full acknowledgement that I, as a literary critic, ‘don’t get it’ because I am a reader that looks at the text from the outside and not from the inside. The only way I could ‘get it’, I noted, is by working side by side with an author, asking questions at all points about the process of writing, which would be excruciatingly tedious for both. The writer’s complaint was that I had analysed the male characters in his trilogy as parts of an ideological puzzle that he felt had nothing to do with the subjective, organic experience of bringing those characters to life. Fair enough, but, then, literary criticism does not have the tools to examine the writer’s psychological processing of characterization. So, the writer suggested that I read another one of his novels, to see what I could make of it. I offered to work alongside him to analyse this novel and run thus an experiment in academic writing. I’m waiting for his reply; in the meantime I certainly will read his novel and get ready.

My parasitical syndrome has reared its ugly head even more painfully in this case because I may have spoiled what has been so far a very special opportunity to stay in touch with this writer that I admire so much. What we, the literary and cultural academic critics, do is, if you think about it, very strange, for we make a living off the work of persons who, like Ricard, have difficulties to make a good living, or like the respected US writer, might feel we ‘don’t get it.’ How do we justify our parasitism? My own justification is that I work to keep up standards, of course, but mainly to publicize among students the work of authors they may not know about, and to ensure the permanence of their work in this way and through academic publications. Obviously, the authors don’t need the support of the academics and if we all disappeared their profession would survive, whereas we need them to continue writing or else lose our jobs. This is why we are parasites, as I fully acknowledge.

There used to be a professor in my Department who was adamantly against doing any academic work on living authors, with the argument that their careers could take a sudden turn and our publications be discredited. She had a point and, in fact, I never allow any doctoral student to write about an ongoing literary career. The advantage of writing, as she suggested, only about death authors is that they cannot quarrel with you, of course, and, actually, I’ve seen an example of this in the career of my third conversational partner this week, José Francisco Sánchez, a specialist in Samuel Beckett. As happens, I like my authors living rather than dead precisely because you can ask them about the process of writing, but, then, I can see that I still lack the tact and the tools to do what they expect me (or us) to do. I’ll keep on trying, see if I ever ‘get it’, for that’s what I most would like.

Thanks for reading!