Final Judgments by Joan Fuster (tr. Mary Ann Newman)
Review by Laetitia Erskine
Virginia Woolf likened the process of writing sentences to ‘tickling a kitten.’ The phrase comes to mind when reading Joan Fuster’s 1968 book of aphorisms Final Judgements. Full of charm and sly wit, it is hard to predict whether its next move will delight and amuse or suddenly bite. The effect is often a playful mixture of these two registers. Fuster’s intellectual position is that certainty is rare and temporary, and the only given is that all is provisional. But while this could produce despair (he refers to Kafka in such tones, by contrast), Fuster’s observations surf the philosophical abyss, choosing an attitude of pragmatism and sensuality instead – and evident devotion to literature. Because ‘Everything depends on words’, and literature tends to be far more readable than philosophy.
Fuster is a humanist of a warm, ludic and sensual kind that follows, albeit individualistically, in the footsteps of European-Mediterranean voices as superficially varied as Lampedusa and Nietzsche. At times, Fuster reminded me of The Leopard’s Prince Salina, surveying the passing of one era and the onset of another, regretting the puritanism of his wife (exclaiming to his confessor as they travel back from a night with his courtesan: ‘Seven children, she has borne me. Seven children, and I’ve never even seen her navel. She’s the sinner!’). Although Fuster refutes Nietzsche on occasion – ‘…‘’Human, all too human’’…’ Nothing is too human.’ – it is hard to imagine Fuster existing except after Nietzsche’s iconoclasms, after world war, after European revolutions, the fall of empires and the invention of the nuclear bomb. But it is Nietzsche at his most exuberant, as in The Gay Science (a work taking its title from the Provençal troubadour tradition the philosopher admired) that enlivens Fuster’s optic. Nietzsche made aphorisms part of his signature and, even though Fuster sees the form through modern eyes as suffering from ‘decadence’, they share a spirit of contradictoriness, a love of paradox, and a high perceptiveness and tolerance of the absurd.
Fuster explains his compulsion towards the aphorism in his Preface to Final Judgements, and it has specific and humble origins. As a child in 1920s Valencia, his reading opportunities were limited to The Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Catholic calendar and piece of popular merchandise that hung in his household, annually replaced. Each day he would read, ‘a brief message of morality or dogma parcelled out’. This was the ‘distant and ludicrous source’ of his later work and no less than ‘his first literary aspiration,’ eventually transformed into what he describes, without donning of grandeur, as these ‘accretions of counsels, proverbs and impertinent remarks.’
His father was a woodworker, conservative and with cultural roots deep in Catholic tradition. But he handed no sense of prohibition to his son as to what he might go on to read. Fuster studied Law but soon abandoned its practice in favour of writing. He began an extremely prolific career as a writer for hire both scholarly and popular, besides his original works of poetry and cultural essay. Translator Mary Ann Newman quotes his summation of the professional writer’s life: ‘you start by putting a sheet of paper in the typewriter. When you have written for more than an hour and a half, you have begun to lose money’. Concision is evident as among Fuster’s super-skills, but his erudition knew no short cuts. At the end of his life, he left a library of 25,000 books to his hometown of Sueca. A decade earlier, this same library had suffered great damage when ultra-right, anti-Catalanist zealots bombed his house, reacting to the reputation Fuster had gained as a spokesperson for an assertive, geographically broad Catalan culture – a position in brave defiance of the authoritarian and Spanish-nationalist brutality of Franco’s regime.
Fuster’s references range from the Bible to Mallarmé, from Voltaire and Balzac to ‘Tolstoyevski’, and from the Greek Pantheon to Picasso. I have rarely read a book – especially such a short one! – that had me tapping dictionary and translation searches into my phone so often. But this was not in frustration, more an experience like a crossword geek slotting long-sought answers into place, and perhaps making a surprise digression into reading Mallarme’s ‘Sonnet en X’ as well. I am now unsurprised to be thanking Fuster for my first encounter with the word ‘callypgian,’ that is, having well-shaped buttocks. For all his intellectual breadth, Fuster’s perspective is marked by unexpected sendups. It returns to the body with delight, and with a sense of the radicalism of this position too. ‘You have a body. Use it, and enjoy it!’ he counsels, and ‘Five bodily senses! We demand more!’ Reading Final Judgments is at once a potted education in European history, a reminder not to take any one position to extreme – as ‘All ideas end up suffering from rheumatism’ – and like sharing the best after-dinner chocolates, is full of palate-cleansing punch.
Final Judgements is published by Fum D’Estampa Press, September 2022