I had stumbled across it while reading Dublinesque , and a week later, there I was, sitting in the aeroplane that would take me to Geneva, trying to lose theories but always looking for them. I was traveling to Switzerland convinced that a change of scenery would be providential in my quest to write an essay on the work of the Spanish writer.
I was leaving London in the hope that the land of the silent Robert Walser would be able to bring to life the series of mad ideas that previously had translated into heavy, tedious, infertile digressions. More than to lose theories β I understand that now β I was making this journey in order to embody them. Beyond the historical categories we had learned at school β beyond Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism or even Surrealism β I wanted to think of the avant-garde as an impulse, as a force that helped art reach the limit of obsession, and then take, as Maurice Blanchot had requested of it, the step where it ran the risk of madness and solitude.
Or, to put it another way, closer to the phrasing of Vila-Matas: I wanted to think of the avant-garde as the impulse that led art forward in its line of flight. So I travelled to Switzerland guided by an intuition: that there, next to the snowy Alps, hid the essence of something daring and incomprehensible. After a month immersed in his work, a month immersed in a labyrinth of quotes and theories, I had discovered another impulse. It became this great ghost, a great emptiness around which, as Roberto Juarroz suggested, the party of writing had its origin:.
According to this barely sketched-out theory, the history of art and literature has been the phantasmagorical history of this disappearance and the party of its multiple reincarnations. A series of recent novels, each of which followed the ghostlike traces of avant-garde writers, led me to believe that this intuition was not entirely misguided. To my mind, as the years went by, Lausanne, home of the enigmatic collection of art brut , had come to seem the last stronghold of the avant-garde.
My imagination, or perhaps my fantasy, had laid its hopes of discovering the true art of obsession. As the years went by, every time I found myself lacking in energy or inspiration, every time ideas refused to materialise, I would discover a homeopathic respite in the biographies of the artists of the art brut. Men and women one step beyond the abyss of madness.
