La Zona Fantasma: Run, Everyone, Run!

Last year, amid the somewhat premature flurry leading up to the insufferable celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote (the first part, at least), I wrote an article entitled “Run, Cervantes, Run!” which annoyed a number of people who were anxiously waiting to take advantage of the festivities, most especially one novelist with a particularly pathetic destiny: so determined to be more like Cervantes than any other writer, the poor man was blissfully unaware that everything that flows from his pen is about as fresh-smelling as a pair of old plaid bedroom slippers or the casino of a derelict city lost somewhere in the provinces. In any event, the year of Don Quixote has come and gone, and many people have ended up feeling more or less as I predicted: fed up with that splendid novel, to say nothing of its extraordinary characters, the region of La Mancha, and poor Miguel de Cervantes himself, who lived a difficult life and who is undoubtedly not resting in peace. In the end, though, there was at least some level of justification—a nice, even number—for organizing all those trivial events that only trivialized the book, bewildering and manhandling the author who, being dead, had nowhere to run. Dead people, as we all know, are so defenseless, the most defenseless among us.

When I think about it, though, the title for that article was all wrong, because in fact, we were the ones who needed to run, not Cervantes, and the most exasperating thing of all about it is that, given the current state of the art and history markets, it looks as if we’re going to have to run for the hills every year from now on. It all started with the centenaries, bicentennaries and other “aries” of historical events: kings and their reigns, unforgettable wars, significant battles. Then came the centenaries and other “aries” of writers and artists in general, at which point the whole thing was instantly doubled: one hundred years after the birth, and then one hundred years after the death of the person in question, even though I don’t know that anyone has figured out which is more important. As Francisco Rico recently pointed out, the Spanish writer Juan Benet protested that the newspapers dedicated many more pages to the death, and precious few to the birth, of a great writer. But anyway, after this came the celebrations in honor of the hundred-year anniversary of the publication of a given work, and since certain authors left behind several worthy works, the list runs from Madame Bovary to A Sentimental Education and down to Bouvard and...