"The novel is dead." This article of faith has been repeated over and over since Marshall McLuhan, in the '60s, decreed the end of the Gutenberg Era and its substitution by an audiovisual universe in which what is important is not what is said, but what says it.
Gutenberg's wake, paradoxically, perhaps gave literature a new lease on life. If the medium was the message, what would become of the message? McLuhan made us think, in other words, about all that could not be communicated by the media. We were forced to rethink literature as all that could not be said by the message of the media.
It proved to be a very great deal indeed. The evidence is there. Never has the art of the novel occupied such vast and extensive territories. From Japan to Nigeria and from Puerto Rico to Australia, novels are today being published, more unexpected, diverse and indicative of the existence of times and spaces--vast times and spaces--left unexplored by the media.
It suffices, for example, to read "A Book of Memories" by the Hungarian Peter Nadas--praised by Susan Sontag as "the greatest novel written in our time"--or the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's "The Black Book"--regarded by Juan Goytisolo as the herald of a whole new cultural identity for the coming century--to reveal the deceit of an information era that seeks to convince us that because we receive such a mass of information, we are consequently supremely well-informed.
A good novel shatters this illusion. It reveals the pretense of an information machine that is powerful because information is power and power is information. We live in an age that subjects us to abundant information that is at the same time insignificant while concealing information that might be considered elitist, controversial or, sin of sins, intellectually stimulating.
The importance of the Contest of Spanish Language Novels convoked by the Alfaguara publishing house in Spain last year has, for all of these reasons, three dimensions: The first is the sheer number of unpublished manuscripts received from all corners of the Spanish-speaking world: more than 600. Each one of them, apart from its quality, is proof of a striking faith in the very act of writing. All of them were motivated by the need to say something that could not be said in any other way. I believe that this will to write the world is what gives intrinsic value to each of the works sent to the contest.
