The Abyss of Writing: Literature and the Sublime in Vila-Matas’s El mal de Montano

Abstract

This article explores the malady mentioned in the title of Enrique Vila-Matas’s El mal de Montano (2002) by means of Neil Hertz’s study of the moment of blockage in Kant’s drama of the sublime. It aims to elucidate Vila-Matas’s conjoining of innovation and disappearance. Montano’s malady, it argues, derives from the belief that literature is too vast to allow writers to innovate, and that the narrator’s attempts to cure it are efforts to establish literature’s limits and thus master the totality of it. Yet such scenarios of sublime confrontation fail and thus show that they aimed to reassure a certain notion of authorship. The narrator, however, realizes that a writer does not need to surpass literature’s powers in order to innovate, and that conventional ideas of originality can be sacrificed. It is at such a point, and without abandoning the belief in literature’s sublime magnitude, that disappearance becomes his ultimate goal.