Miguel de Unamuno, the old rector who stood up to Millán Astray, has become a skilled investigator in the novel The First Case of Unamuno. Before him they had become unexpected sleuths from Isabel II – in the novels of Sophia Bennett – to Angela Merkel – in those of David Safier –, from the monk and poet Gonzalo de Berceo – in The Tavern of Silos, by the mysterious Lorenzo G. Acebedo – to Dante Alighieri in the stories of Giulio Leoni. That real characters take over fiction is not a surprise, but perhaps the volume of these vicissitudes and the presence, in multiple ways, of reality in current fiction is. Whether in series or in a cinema where the rise of the documentary has changed even when it comes to using non-professional interpreters, as in Alcarràs. La Vanguardia has spoken with experts and creators about the phenomenon and the explanations for the push for reality range from the paradoxes of the current post-truth moment in which we live to literary branding, in which the writer becomes a brand.
For Professor Antonio Monegal, National Essay Prize winner for Como el aire que nos nos, “it is something that has always happened, there is a traditional dialogue between fiction and history, it is in the Cantar de Mio Cid and in Tolstoy's War and Peace Napoleon appears like another character.” From a certain moment onwards, “there is a wave of autofiction, a wave of concern to bring history into the novel, no longer in Tolstoy's way but with a certain fidelity. In a very presentist society at the end of the 20th century, at a time of great forgetfulness, a great wave of concern about the Civil War begins. There's Soldiers of Salamis. But what is distinctive today is a great concern for post-truth. There is one thing that is reality or history, another that is fiction. Post-truth, the danger of the misinformation that comes with it, is that it is a fiction masquerading as truth. It enters into competition with different discourses of truth.” And he points out that “we are progressively witnessing a blurring of the distinctions between the space of the fictional and that of the real or the documentary. In cinema, documentaries are no longer clearly documentaries, and there are many fiction films that look like documentaries.” And he remembers that these days an influencer created by artificial intelligence has appeared. “It's like I let myself be influenced by what Mickey Mouse or Bambi say. If I let myself be advised by my artificial intelligence about what I should do in life, it is as if I let myself be advised by the Terminator. And the idea that that's not based on any reality is the other side of what's going on. Today with artificial intelligence you take Unamuno and make him appear on a program commenting on a demonstration. There may be a fashion in these literary detectives, but the contamination that occurs with that other space, which is the creation of avatars, I suspect will increase.”
For Audiovisual Communication professor Jordi Balló, “a back-and-forth movement is taking place between reality and fiction. Today universal arguments are explained through real stories. It has caught my attention that the biographies of musicians in cinema, whether they were Elton John or Freddie Mercury, were all based on the Faustian plot. That is to say, it was all due to bad company. A rise to fame where the manager character gave bad advice. Baz Luhrmann's Elvis Presley is the same. Tom Hanks' character, the manager, is the real protagonist. Stories that in another era would have been explained as pure fiction, now take fragments of reality and instill them into a universal plot. And that mixture gives a very powerful impact. In Bayonne's Snow Society there is the idea of a community that helps each other and almost founds a homeland, a founding Western.”
For the writer Juan Tallón, author of Masterpiece (Anagrama), full of real fictional characters, “what is surely happening is the greater prestige of non-fiction over the imagination. As if real testimonies had a higher level of credibility. And here a niche has appeared, making historical figures adapt to something we want to tell, when the natural movement until then was for us to submit a little to what we knew the real character had done.
The writer Jorge Carrión highlights that “the invention of reality television at the end of the 20th century, Big Brother, has infected everything. And there is the fake news factor, alternative facts according to Trump. Today there is a greater attention to documentary and biographical narratives than in the 20th century in this new paradigm, and this is seen in the autobiography of Britney Spears, in that of Prince Harry or in series like The crown. But he believes that the fact that “historical figures are observed as detectives responds to the idea that any cultural creator is a researcher and has to do with the brand. If you add the brand of a character with cultural prestige to a genre with a strong brand and important commercial projection like detectives, you ensure media attention. “You take a brand like Sherlock and renew it with a prestige reality brand.”
Professor Enrique Santos Unamuno, great-grandson of the writer and who directs a project on the post-literary uses of literature, studies how "authors are put into plots because they already have a brand image, a branding", although he remembers going around to the idea that “personal branding techniques actually emerge in literature. The first European celebrities in the modern context are writers: Lord Byron, Wilde.” And he says that “literature has always been nourished by symbols and when capitalism enters it is the furthest thing from the disinterested world that humanists sell. These operations exploit what has constituted modern literature since it entered into collusion with capitalism.”
The writers who have created these peculiar new detectives talk about the help they provide to explain an era and the border between reality and fiction. The mysterious Lorenzo G. Acebedo who has turned Gonzalo de Berceo into a researcher says that he “is a real character only technically, he is in the same place as Merlín or Santa María Egipciaca. Who was he? A vaporous signature at the end of some poems. In our 21st century imagination, a medieval author is as fictional as his characters. And a priest and a detective are more or less the same: their job is to find out in others the specific faults and the degree of guilt, to help them or condemn them. And he believes that the only way to approach an era “is to invent a character who helps invent the era. Historians are novelists: they talk about the era in which they live, not the one they study or invent.” And he adds that he is fascinated by “real characters who have ended up becoming fictional characters: from Penelope to Hitler, including Cleopatra, Don Quixote and Napoleon.”
Sophia Bennett, author of the Her Majesty, the Investigative Queen (Salamandra) series, says of Elizabeth II that “her benign sense of moral purpose reminded me of the golden age detectives I loved, like Lord Peter Wimsey, from the novels. by Dorothy L. Sayers,” and that he is “intrigued by the contrast between its extreme familiarity and its permanent air of mystery. She never gave interviews, there is a lot of room to imagine what she was thinking.”
For García Jambrina, already in Unamuno's novels “fiction is real and reality is fiction. Today is a very complicated moment. Unamuno would be scandalized by the post-truth era. It means legitimizing the lie. The search for the truth is replaced by a story and the most seductive one prevails. Fact and fiction no longer make sense. “It would be interesting for Unamuno to analyze what is happening.”
