After dinner, the worker, who hasn’t earned much, wants to give himself a luxury before falling asleep, which has come to be called this, and, betrayed on the couch, pushes in his command and gets into Filmin. What you want to see, no trace, quickly collapses into your themed supermarket: First, he has exhibited “the memory of the Holocaust”, “the feminism of the Middle East”, “the lies of Iraq”, “the abuses of the Church” and “the end of ETA”. He wondered if they weren't great pebbles for those hours, and he continued his scrolling for a while: “big collapses”, “first love”, “corrupt policemen”, “LGTBI pride”, “sects”, “narcos”. Maybe it was one of them, he thought, but looking at it well, I said to him: “Mustache in cinema”, “let’s talk about sex”, “cruising”, “Easter”. For another effort he has gathered forces: “summer stories,” “shots and pastries,” “pools,” “what Trump does not see.” Let's say that this last one has been brought to your attention, after the U.S. elections. Or let's say no, you've wagered on another topic. It doesn't matter. Here is another question: if at this time when the label has become a criterion for reaching fiction, we have not made a further leap in the insistence of culture; if the entry of the tag to the living room has not hurt the fictional gaze that had already suffered the canine cough. It's obvious on platforms like Filmin, Netflix or HBO. For the functioning of the cultural industry, it is necessary to invent groups of consumers who use labels as bait for certain targets. Of course, this trade operation has consequences: by turning everything into a bag of labels, you can find the jobs that are formally in antipodes under the same keyword. But the most worrying conclusion, probably, is the one that corresponds to the recipient's gaze. The shadow of the label has come to our ways of reaching films, novels or theatres of all kinds. The thematic parameter determines us enormously the choice of fiction: tell me what it is, what it is, and I'll tell you that I'm going to address it.

The theme of fiction feeds the tenacity: a type of gaze - in the opposite of formalism - that limits itself to fishing the theme that would remain behind the works of fiction. Peio Aguirre has written on the case: “Don’t we remember that art is not a reality, but a reflection of it or, if you will, a new reality invented in its entirety? If we look around us, we will hardly find a reality that is presented to us as a theme. We will see many realities that fight and contradict each other.” In his opinion, the theme is a staple for conservative thinking, as it needs to reduce the dimensions of the work to a single category. There are plenty of examples that point to the strength of this trend: the critic José María Pozuelo Yvancos reduced the time to awaken together Kirmen Uribe to apology for nationalism, or the range of reactions provoked by the film by Jaime Rosales Tyre in the head (One shot in the head) that stated that it was unacceptable to approach the issue of ETA violence in this way. In many cases, even in readings based on supposedly progressive values, although no one has explicitly said so, resistance is observed to recognize that the work can represent a complexity beyond the theme, and it is intended to land as soon as possible, to the most hermetic category possible, to the essence. The reverse of L’art pour l’art: art reduced to the subject. The phenomenon of the tag only arouses this broader trend.

Resurrection of the author

Roland Barthes killed the author in 1968, altering the schemes of fiction until then. The work would no longer be something that an active author produced for a passive receiver. With the death of the author, the work ceased to be dependent on him, becoming open source. And their interpretation corresponded only to the receiver. The recognition of the centrality of the work and, therefore, of the receiver, can be understood as a demand for a complex view of fiction, because it stresses that an artifact can bring together in itself a variety of dimensions – many of them, beyond the control of the author – that multiplies differently in each receiver and that, therefore, it cannot be reduced to a single theme – or to a single lot of themes.

But for more than half a century, when Barthes wrote that, one looks around and really finds it hard to believe that the author is dead. On the contrary, it remains alive, not only in the sense of before Barthes' death, but also in the public square. The artist has risen and is now the entrepreneur or even the entrepreneur, because it is not enough to talk about his book and reinvented as a brand, trying to turn everything that is – work, speech, ideas, body – into a product and sell it to anyone, like everyone else in the background. At the same time, the cultural offering has been overwhelmed, you raise a stone and you find a list of 100 must-see series, and then books, and movies, and the mind can't hold any more data. All by hand, but without time to see everything: the choice of one or the other often depends on the logic of the synopsis, and the decoy of the label leads us to fiction. In any case, this is not an isolated issue. It fits perfectly with the trend of the time.

A fictional look in crisis

The pastor yelled, “The wolf comes!” but there was no wolf coming. At that time, fiction was born, according to Vladimir Nabokov. In almost all of human history, narratives have been conceived to be believed. Literature comes from mythology and religions, and the Bible was written as a story that, without going any further, had to be taken to the letter. The field of fiction spread gradually and, after centuries of intellectual work, reached its peak in the great novel of the 19th century. Then the framework of the novel was established, in a kind of pact between the author and the reader: we both know that there is no wolf, but let us play in this mirror to imagine its arrival. It was assumed that if something similar to reality was presented in a novel, it was simply a coincidence.

Things have changed a lot since then. Maurice Blanchot announced almost two decades ago that the novel was going to be smoked. At the moment, expectations have not been met, but it is true that the novel has been searching for new ways of subsistence for a long time, and its survival has been threatened. Many of these roads, like the Roman nouveau, resorted to language experimentation, language violation, making extreme formal bets. But it wasn't a free experiment. They were trying to respond to a deep thorn: the novel, as an artifact, was not as useful as it was in the past to tell the world, to talk about people's problems. Doris Lessing said: “XIX. The great names of the 15th century did not coincide either in religious matters, in politics, or in aesthetic criteria. But there was something that united them: they had similar ethical values.” Those humanist values that survived existentialism in one way or another have completely disappeared, and the novel has been in crisis since then. He seems doomed to collect partial reports. In this port, a large group of writers — Sebald, Ernaux, DeLillo, etc. — began to resort to autofialization. Today, this trend has gone to the extreme and not only in literature, where you can see hybrid artifacts, pieces that go between reality and fiction. In addition to self-creation, biographies and memories are booming: it seems that it is the first person to fascinate the reader, more than anything. It's the time of the narrative self.

At the same time, we live in times of hyperreality, of mass media, whose orchestrated narratives accompany almost the event. Examples, thousands: The fall of the Twin Towers or, closer, all the overflow that has occurred around COVID-19, war metaphors and fragmented periods in concrete phases. Reality produces in a few hours the pompous narratives of all classes, and fiction is getting harder and harder to compete with.

This picture has its risks. It seems that the way of perceiving fiction is changing - as if it had become insignificant by being omnipresent - and that the old pact between the author and the receiver is once again in crisis. Few already believe in the wolf and are increasingly wondering why the pastor announces his arrival.

Fiction and commitment

Many of these simplistic readings of fiction are often characteristic of their political-ideological plane, without realizing that these dimensions cannot be seriously analyzed from a perspective that is reduced to content. They remember the old question of compromised literature. In the boom of the 1960s in South America it was a very much discussed issue. Literary innovation and politics then seemed to go hand in hand, helped by the illusion of the Cuban Revolution. In this context, Ricardo Piglia referred to the issue of literary commitment. In his opinion, the term “committed literature” implies an individualistic attitude. On the contrary, he preferred to understand literature as a social practice and to analyze the role that fiction plays in society. Piglia says that literature has to be committed to language, which has to be able to criticize the main uses of language. Only by doing so would it build an alternative framework to the language used by the State, or the market.

The compromise debate cannot be reduced to the subject, therefore, nor to the content: it has more to do with the type of language used – and, therefore, with the formal issues –. “Literature is a society without a state,” says Piglia, “no institution or other force can force anyone to wager on a certain artistic poetics.” That is why he believes that the commitment is not to talk about political issues in fiction, but about dynamics between the museum and the market. The coordinates of artistic commitment are the museum as a metaphor for legitimacy and consecration, and the market as a framework for the circulation of works, always conditioned by money. “Within this framework the question of creation becomes more visible and complex at the same time.”

Today is fictitious

As has already been mentioned, self-fication and hybrid artifacts related to reality are well quoted in the fiction theme park. The next variant of this trend is fiction with current themes. In the content market, it is hardly possible to find a more attractive label than the one that has just happened. In this need to compete with hyperreality, more than ever, the immediate past, almost the present, becomes fictitious.

Elias Canetti was in Paris in May 1968. He lived the facts first, but he wrote nothing about them. Later, the journalists asked him surprisingly whether that experience had not affected him anything. “For a long time I was circling those events,” Canetti replied, “I still follow him. That is precisely why I am not mentioning them anywhere. It's not up to me to think about all the facts, like journalists and politicians; I try to bring the experiences within me, until I feel like I've come to understand them. I couldn't tell them anything about them before they realized it. It would be irresponsible.”

Far from the spirit of Canetti, Paolo Giordano started writing Nel contagion on February 29 of this year. It ended in a couple of weeks, and for a month I was on the street, in the midst of a pandemic, the intimate diary set in the arrival of COVID-19 – published in Basque by the editorial Erein with the title Kutsaldia-. Soon after the works of fiction began: Roberto Rodríguez Moro published El confinado (Confinado), a thriller written in 15 days; María Zabay soon removed Implicit (Isolated), the story of a young man who is trapped by the pandemic in Venice; Luis Campo Vidal arrived My dreamed country (The country of my dreams), written for 20 days of confinement. The wave also jumped into the series: Grey’s Anatomy predicted that the next season will be set around the coronavirus. And these are just some of the first examples. In any case, beyond these extreme examples, the trend is evident: without going any further, there are two of the three series that ETB has produced for the fall, Alardea and Altsasu. More and more is wagered on topics that directly question the receiver. Today, of course, will always have more tiradizos for it. Another marginal effect of the label logic is that it strengthens presenteeism. With reduced fiction, short-distance links are encouraged, making it difficult to hold deep interviews between works, which necessarily respond to diverse logics.

Pedagogy of complex reading

Of course, the wind is not going away, we live saturated and the narrative floods are escaping to us every day by the opposite throat. It's not the ideal climate for the quiet look that fiction requires. In this whirlwind, it seems that the label is dominating as the main grasp for fiction, and sheltered from the label, the toughness, a reductive look that seeks to hunt the theme of fiction. In comparison, there is a little pedagogy for complex readings. Perhaps there is still something to be rescued from the arrival of Barthes, for example, to understand fiction as an open source. And, incidentally, pay attention to dimensions beyond content. Following the example of Piglia, the political game of fiction is not played in the possible contents of each work, but in the dispute of the main language that the market wants to impose. And that, if it ever comes, will necessarily come from the recognition of the centrality of the language of fiction and the aesthetic issues that concern it.