Authors often cannot exactly define what mechanism led them to underline it or consider it a revelation. Which is why Carner talks about the "given word" and René Clair writes that "the beginning of a novel, like the first verse Valéry talks about, is a gift from heaven". They would probably be incapable of describing this revelation beyond the "jumble of feelings" that Jaume Cabré refers to. But the artist knows that the development of this central idea involves a simultaneous revelation of feeling, and maybe that is why authors like Jaume Cabré or Miguel Unamuno warn us that they start to write without really knowing where the story will take them, how it will develop and how it will end. Because, in fact, the plot of a novel is the outer skin of a complex whole that gradually acquires precision and substance. And the plot adapts to it, because the artist does not talk of things but in things So, things or the plot are the instrument, shaped to fit its function, of meaning.
(…)The space in which all this happens is the ideal one for understanding this, as it is set in the late 18th century. And not just because this was a time in which make-up, by which I mean artifice and manners, was a replacement for identity, but above all because it was a world that, like the protagonist, was condemned. The novel is set in the last months of 1799 as a symbol of the end of a century and the dawn of a new era. In fact, no moment in history has been as radical and decisive for the future of European society as the 18th to 19th turn of the century. It was a time at which the whole of Europe was feeling the effects of the French Revolution, which brought down the old regime of social organisation based on blood privilege. The Revolution gave birth to a society that was based on the principle of equality between all people and that believed in freedom as an inalienable condition of human dignity. It was also a moment at which the winds of change irreversibly swept away classicism, giving way to the uncontainable force of romantic authenticity and freedom in the arts.
(…)What the reader finds in Senyoria is, rather than an impeccably reproduced picture of an era, the experience of the cornering and destruction of a guilty man who, like a sewer rat, attempts to evade danger but ends up being squashed all the same. They will find, then, the whole process, ranging from arrogance and contempt to humiliation and defeat, and the dethroning of a character, not because someone else snatches his crown, but as a result of the rottenness of the system that sustains him. And most of all, they will find the experience of staggering and finally falling, humiliated and vulnerable, at the feet of their enemies, in an agony of dishonour and shame. From inside the experience.
This is what makes Rafael Massó the object of our contempt as well as of our pity. It is also what makes this protagonist into not only a symptom but also a complex character, what Forster would call rounded. who we recognise as someone similar to ourselves. His experience - "Madame Bovary c’est moi" Flaubert said, and he wasn't a woman, or an adulterer or provincial - is also ours.
Extract from the Preface to Senyoria. ‘Biblioteca Jaume Cabré’ edition. Proa Barcelona 1999