Miguel de Unamuno, the old rector who stood up to Millán Astray, has become an investigative character in the novel The First Case of Unamuno. Before him, they had become unexpected researchers from Elisabeth II - in the novels of Sophie Bennett - to Angela Merkel - in those of David Safier -, from the monk and poet Gonzalo de Berceo - in La taberna from Silos, from the mysterious Lorenzo G. Acebedo – to Dante Alighieri in the stories of Giulio Leoni. That real characters take fiction is no surprise, but perhaps the volume of these avatars and the presence, in multiple ways, of reality in current fiction. Whether in series or in a cinema, the rise of the documentary has changed even when it comes to using non-professional interpreters, as in Alcarràs. La Vanguardia spoke with experts and creators about the phenomenon and the explanations of the push for what is real range from the paradoxes of the current post-truth moment in which we live to literary branding, in which the writer becomes Mark.
According to professor Antonio Monegal, National Essay Award for Como el aire que respiramos, "it is something that has always happened, there is a traditional dialogue between fiction and history, it is in Cantar del mio Cid, and it appears in War and Peace by Tolstoy Napoleon as another character". After a certain moment, "there is a wave of self-fiction, a wave of concern to bring the story to the novel, no longer in the manner of Tolstoy 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 for the Civil War begins. There are Soldiers of Salamis. But the hallmark today is a strong preoccupation with post-truth. There is one thing that is reality or history, and another that is fiction. With post-truth, the danger of the misinformation that comes with it is that it is fiction masquerading as truth. It competes with different discourses of truth". And he points out that "we are gradually witnessing an erasure 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 fictional films that look like documentaries”. And remember 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 my artificial intelligence advise me about what I should do in life, it's like letting me be advised by the Terminator. And the idea that this is not based on any reality is the other side of what is happening. 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 pollution that takes place with this other space, which is the creation of avatars, I suspect will go further”.
According to Audiovisual Communication professor Jordi Balló, "a back and forth between reality and fiction is taking place. Today, universal arguments are explained through real stories. It has really caught my attention that biographies of musicians in the cinema, whether it was Elton John or Freddie Mercury, were all based on the Faustian argument. That is to say, that everything was due to the bad companies. A rise to fame in which the manager's 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 in a universal argument. And the mix gives a very powerful impact. In La sociedad de la nieve de Bayona there is the idea of a community that helps each other and almost founds a homeland, a western of foundation”.
The writer Juan Tallón, author of Obra maestra (Anagrama), full of fictional real characters, says that "what is certainly happening is that non-fiction has more prestige today than imagination. As if actual witnesses have a higher rank of credibility. And here a niche has appeared: making historical characters adapt to something we want to explain, 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 emphasizes that "the invention of reality TV at the end of the 20th century, Big Brother, has put everything in charge. 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 can be seen in the autobiography of Britney Spears, that of Prince Harry or in series such as The crown”. But he believes that the fact "that there are historical figures who are observed as detectives responds to the idea that any cultural creator is an investigator 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 such as detectives, you ensure media attention. You take a brand like Sherlock's and renew it with a prestigious brand of reality."
Precisely the 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", although he remembers, turning the idea, that "really the techniques of personal branding in which they arise is in the 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 the humanists sell. These operations exploit what has constituted modern literature since it entered into collusion with capitalism”.
The writers who have created the peculiar new detectives talk about the help they suppose 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 personage only technically, he is in the same place as Merlin or Saint Mary of Egypt. Who was? A steamy 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, in order to help them or condemn them”. And he believes that the only way to approach an era "is to invent a character that helps to invent the era. Historians are novelists: they talk about the era they live in, not the one they study or invent”. And he adds that he is fascinated by "the real characters who have ended up becoming fictional characters: from Penelope to Hitler, through Cleopatra, Don Quixote or Napoleon".
Sophia Bennett, author of the series Her Majesty the Queen Investigator (Salamandra) explains of Elizabeth II that “her benign sense of moral purpose reminded me of the Golden Age detectives I loved, such as Lord Peter Wimsey, from the novels of D.L. Sayers", and that he is "intrigued by the contrast between his extreme familiarity and his permanent air of mystery. He never gave interviews, there is a lot of room to imagine what he thought".
According to García Jambrina, already in Unamuno's novels "fiction is real and reality is fiction. Today is a very complicated time. 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 what is more seductive prevails. This reality and fiction thing no longer makes sense. It would be interesting if Unamuno analyzed what is happening".
