School of Hope

There are days when I suffer from the feeling that we are witnessing, from a privileged throne, the agony of the final days of literature. The media, with increasing professionalism, succeed in misinforming us about the most valuable works, not to mention increasingly appalling and botched processes of commercialization. He warned Pier Paolo Pasolini, more than fifty years ago, of the abominable homogenization of all this, of a progressively decadent intellectual mediocrity. And moments of stark despair erupt when you realize that the only thing that ends up attracting attention is this series of shameless works that proudly display private shame, and it is their elusive gesture of scandal that captures a spotlight that doesn't even last the fifteen minutes of fame predicted by And. However, books suddenly come to you that help you regain faith in this diabolical passion for literature. The posthumous volume Prose course, by Vicenç Pagès Jordà, edited and with an epilogue by Enric Sullà and presented by Camila Massot Kleiner for the Josep Pla collection of the Girona Provincial Council, is one of those monuments of words that invite us to maintain our wounded enthusiasm for writing.

As a writer, Vicenç Pagès Jordà was a true master at creating works that drew on the best narrative traditions while simultaneously challenging them and forcing them into new territory. It is only natural, then, that the creator ofThe World of Horace defended sharp pens like those of Gabriel Galmés or Biel Mesquida, verbal pioneers. As a reader and as a literary critic, Pagès Jordà presents an incisive, original, challenging, and nourishing perspective, as it forces us to read and reread works of all kinds from other, often innovative and provocative, perspectives. The result of his research (the Attic prose of Maria Àngels Anglada, the allegories of Mar Bosch, the adjectival pirouettes of Josep Pla, the art of the diary in the hands of Miquel Pairolí or JN Santaeulàlia, the intensities of Toni Sala...) is an illuminating banquet.

Vicenç Pagès Jordà's brilliant essay writing unfolds with a lucidity that, however, never renounces tenderness. His surgical and intimate prose transforms the analytical method into a textual adventure, a shared emotion. It seems that each of his interpretations pulses with an intelligence that brings us closer to the essence of the texts he reads without ever losing his clinical and critical eye. And Pagès Jordà writes, at all times, with a subtle but never bitter irony, capable of making the cogs of thought reverberate. His fascinating Prose course It is the culmination of a wise and longed-for human experience that becomes an undoubted school of hope.