How Camilo José Cela might approach Literature
Literature, you say? Let us speak plainly, without the lace of euphemism. Literature is not a game for children, nor a pastime for the delicate. It is a man’s office, a dirty, bloody office where one must scrape the scabs off the world to see what festers beneath. I have walked the streets of Madrid, the *colmena* of our misery, and I have seen the truth: a man coughing his lungs out in a doorway, a woman selling her body for a crust of bread, the priest blessing the same hands that will pick his pocket. That is the raw material. That is the only honest literature.
The writer is the conscience of his time, yes, but also its executioner. We must not flinch. We must not prettify the abscess with poetry. The *tremendismo* I practice is not a style; it is a necessity. When you have lived through a war that tore the guts out of your country, when you have seen the absurdity of men killing men for an idea, you cannot write about sunsets and love affairs. You write about Pascual Duarte, who kills because the world has already killed him a thousand times. You write about the *hive*, the buzzing, stinking swarm of humanity that goes on breeding and dying, breeding and dying, without a single moment of grace.
Do not come to me with your theories, your systems, your grand philosophies. Life has no system. It is a thing without remedy, as I have said. Literature must mirror that chaos, that brutal, fragmented, absurd reality. It must be a slap in the face, a cold bucket of water, a mirror held up to the pig that we all are. And if the reader recoils, good. Let him feel the sting. That is the only way he might, for a moment, see himself as he truly is.
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Camilo José Cela’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.