Journalism, Fiction and Reality in Juan José Millás’ Todo son preguntas, El ojo de la cerradura, and Sombras sobre sombras

Abstract

In the summers of 2004, 2005 and 2006 the Spanish writer Juan José Millás
published a series of articles that later appeared in three volumes titled Todo son preguntas, El ojo de la cerradura and Sombras sobre sombras. His essays are best understood as a meditation about press photos that inspire both questions and answers, expressing a poetics grounded in a spatial conception of the world that explicitly invokes the platonic image of the cave. The writer utilizes literary fiction as a tool to interpret reality —represented here in the series of photos— and, in so doing, problematizes the limits between truth and appearance. It is only by adding shadows to a world replete with simulacra, Millás seems to say, that we can make any sense of the world at all.