José Ovejero

Anagrama Award of Essay 2012

We are used to witnessing extreme violence, torture, rape and humiliations in all forms of art. Cruelty portrayed in this way is often presented as entertainment. However, there is a kind of cruelty that does not satisfy the viewer’s morbid curiosity or compromise his values, but confronts him with his hypocrisies and miseries. It is regarded as ethics in the sense that it seeks to transform the reader, even though it sometimes has to hurt him in order to do so. It offers no certainties, but rather the contrary.

This book defends a literature contrary to the culture of entertainment and the pos-tmodern asepsis, a literature that rejects the innocuous and accomodating. José Ovejero illustrates his theory with an original exploration of novels by Bataille, Canetti, Luis Martín-Santos, Cormac McCarthy, Onetti and Jelinek, authors who are all cruel in their own way. After reading them, one cannot live the same way as before. And the same thing will happen to whoever reads this essay.