Seeing as I have this custom of recounting journeys in advance, I wrote this speech before I left Barcelona for Guadalajara. Well, I know it’s obvious that I wrote it before, otherwise I wouldn’t be reading it now. The advantage of this is that I know how it ends, which just goes to show, whatever people may think, the future sometimes isn’t so impossible to decipher.

If I forced myself to talk to you about the future it was mainly because this prize, formerly the Premio Juan Rulfo, looks only at the work of writers who “make a significant contribution to contemporary literature” and I wanted it known that I perhaps fit this criterion because I have always written with the necessity of finding writing that would pose strictly contemporary questions of us, with the necessity of finding structures that would not limit themselves to reproducing models already obsolete a hundred years ago.

It’s so much my custom to look for new ways of writing that I am now going to talk to you not about how I write, but about how I would like to write. For that I’m going to turn to Robert Walser, that Swiss writer once referred to by Christopher Domínguez Michael as “my moral hero.”

Walser seems to have felt a real sense of liberation from himself the night he took a balloon ride from Bitterfeld to a beach on the Baltic. A journey over a slumbering night-time Germany. “Three people climb into the basket, the strange house, the anchoring chords are loosed, and the balloon flies slowly upward.” Walser was a saunterer par excellence, a walker in truth born for this noiseless airborne journey since he wanted in all his prose works to take to the air, away from the heaviness of earthly life, to slip gently and quietly into a freer kingdom.

I’d like to write taking to the air, away from the heaviness of earthly life. But, then, if I were to do so, would the routes I take overlap with the night flights I suspect the novel will take in the future? At the beginning of this century, I’d still have said so, yes: some journeys would overlap. Maybe I was still an optimist in those days, because I felt myself allied with these lines by Borges: “What will the indecipherable future dream? It will dream that Alonso Quijano can be Don Quixote without leaving his village and his books.”

My view then was that in the novels of the future it would no longer be necessary to leave the village for open terrain because thought, rather than action, would begin to take precedence. Believing, naively, in the demands that would be made by readers in the century to come, I thought that in the indecipherable future the nineteenth-century novel—whose best work already seemed to me to have been done—would begin to give way to the narrative essay, or essayistic narratives, and might even allow for the arrival of a murky, compact kind of prose, like Sebald’s (that is, altogether like Nietzsche’s way of life, literature), or like Sergio Pitol’s, the Sergio Pitol of The Magician of Vienna, the kind of compact prose with which the author would dissolve genre boundaries, making all waymarkers disappear and turning texts into fragments joined together by a perfectly unified structure: a prose that is not just spare but naked, the prose of the new century.

I thought this century would see the arrival of a kind of novel already quite happily occupying the borderlands: a novel that would have no problem mixing autobiography and essay, travel and diary accounts, and pure fiction—the reality that is brought to the text as such. I thought we’d be moving towards a literature in keeping with the spirit of the times, a compound literature, one in which the limits would not be clear and reality would be able to dance at the frontier with fiction, and the rhythm would blur this frontier.