(Jordi Gracia, outdoors. Exile and culture in Spain, Barcelona, \u200b\u200bAnagram, 2o10) .
can not be a historian without being curious, and Jordi Gracia is one of those people who want to know everything, one of those dedicated researchers who exhaust their objects study long before exhausted themselves, and one of those writers who manage to convey to readers the passion with which they have undertaken their work. So slowly but also very fast, is shaping the map of a territory, the intellectual landscape of Franco, where each day, with each reading and each data moves more comfort, safety and perspective. And while, in parallel, their words and style, so recognizable, they became masters of space as something strange and yours, between publishing and scholarship.
recap: In the spring of 2004 came to light silent resistance. Fascism and culture in Spain , and that was and is and will remain a really important book, a change of course to several debates and a final slam certain prejudices embedded in the democratic imaginary enthusiastic and forgetful. Then came an expansion of state and culture. The awakening of critical consciousness under Franco, 1940-1962 (text from his doctoral thesis) and spent many years, efforts and pages left virtually resolved all about the fascinating figure of Dionysus Ridruejo (and the balance left apart from several articles in Letras Libres or Turia ... a feast consisting of a very substantial new edition of Writing in Spain a proposal for management of some materials for a biography, that's biography, which was titled life of Dionysus rescued Ridruejo - and especially revealing The value of dissent , a striking correspondence, voluminous and often disturbing that deserves much more careful reading and deep that I fear that was dedicated in his day and since then, it is a priceless intellectual portrait of Franco, a unique polyphonic witness the nobility and miseries of each over time and, to use a joke that José-Carlos Mainer applied to other business owners, a kind of Nuremberg trials in which Grace as a good historian, does not exercise both fiscal astute judge of exposing the cards and left it to the readers who will draw the main conclusions. In addition, and apart from almost weekly exercise critical scrutiny of new books, Grace has offered editions of writers as diverse as Mauritius Bacarisse, Alfonso Reyes and Pere Gimferrer, and has coordinated numerous publications and compiled voluminous collective best examples of English and Latin American essays, often with the complicity of his friend Sunday Ródenas de Moya (two of them opened, for example, the collection 'Epistle' of the Publications of the Residencia de Estudiantes, with the successful issue of Epistolary, 1919-1939 and intimate notebooks of Benjamin Jarne, and as I write this review is to announce the publication of his volume to the history of English literature is coordinating Mainer, where they will see them no less than the unruly 'Siglo XX. '...). 1939-2010
Now this outdoors. Exile and culture in Spain discusses the exile of English intellectuals and artists after 1936 or 1939, and does so from several points of view and without staying in the First World War or the Franco high (those years between 1939 and 1952 monster that Grace called the "black quindenio"), but reflecting on how the situation was changing (And the individual situation of several specific names analyzed in detail and through his writings and letters) over the decades and, especially, studied with notable brilliance which led back to Spain or not, and what the implications were that were also dramatic dilemma, like everything else, changing.
The thesis of that part of the book is not exactly new, but is expressed in a clear and sensible: there is no doubt that the exile is a profoundly tragic, mutilating and undesirable, but sometimes has been a lesser evil Compared to the situation in which there are those who remain in a country and unrecognizable, destroyed, or others (as, in our case, "the gagged and abused, harassed and vilified, the English are defeated from within": p. 80), that in certain circumstances the flight, forced or voluntary, is not only the preservation of life or liberty but a new opportunity, a growth stimulus to restart and prosper (and this has been true especially in For women, something that does not point Gracia but ever explained very well Biruté Ciplijauskaité Camprubí Zenobia straight) that "both internal exile as the building with their fears and their own warp that will allow Forge a better, freer and more dignified " (P. 104), and that in any case, "that experience no return but to become" (p. 111) or that "the return revealed the illusory nature essentially frustrating, the desire to return" (p. 112).
Grace explains that "those who lived less dramatically the political defeat also found sooner the reintegration pathways vital" (p. 30). There were people, in effect, which destroyed diaspora slowly consumed immediately or cruel, but other, younger, or more enterprising, less traumatized or damage nearby or who do not let people in Spain at risk , or who had no employment or economic fate before the war ... were able to overcome and react. This also applies to intellectuals and artists, and although each case illustrates a substantially different experience seems convincing the forthrightness with which Pedro Salinas Guillermo de Torre writes in 1941 that "We are much better, a thousand times better. We will or will not do, but we are essentially free to do "(p. 133).
Grace To illustrate all uses, among many examples in the vicissitude of Rafael Lapesa and its mandate to protect the files of the Centre for Historical Studies (pp. 41-44), the Adolfo Salazar (who writes that Ernesto Halffter " for it have made war and killed two million English: that the useless, the mediocre and the rogues pass to the front ": p. 46), shelter that led to the creation of the Colegio de Mexico (pp. 67-68) or the stability of Luis Buñuel (whose absence from Spain is quite smooth or, indeed, different from some friends who saw some time in Mexico, José Moreno Villa, p. 100). As Ortega y Gasset, by picking a particularly controversial, Grace can finally afford to say that "what assumptions and interpretations were based on evidence, is nothing more than certain that the lesser evil during the war, Ortega met him on the side Revolt, and privately placed among those who made the defeat of the Republic and the victory of Franco "(p. 61). Then, and although the early return of someone as influential as Ortega to Spain was one of the first serious disappointment among the exiles, the diagnosis has to change, because "What was seen from exile as political and ideological treason was understood other so from the inside: maybe his work was over her figure, but what is certain is that his mouth could not hear praises of the regime and favorable statements after 1947, nor his conduct would challenge his exclusion from the system "( p. 119).
Return Ortega, therefore, can be regarded as paradigmatic of the second lesson Outdoors, which is what gives the book that has icebreaker "during the fifties began to vanish guilt for collaborating inside the defeated [...] collaborate with the English that is no longer resist in collaboration with the Franco regime or has ceased to be that to become an irreplaceable tool, essential, ethical and intellectual construction of the future "(p . 84). Back to writing for magazines published in Spain, and, therefore, monitored and censored, it was not opportunism but also happened in many cases to swell the network strategies end the dictatorship or at least to start building something different, first tentative signs of smoke and then with an audacity that sometimes was punished. The same is true of the first returns were no longer lameness but brave steps forward. Thus, "the exile who wanted to return, physically or figuratively, had to overcome in all cases, and like many English interior that changed their attitudes, feelings of being excluded or dropping a collective cause. But only chose and played their role in freedom of conscience and acceptance of its consequences, both exiles and returnees add your property to restore some form of freedom within the Franco regime "(p. 127). Ie not returning to submit but to the contrary. If some, like Jarnés, became waste, alienated and unable to continue fighting, and if others, such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, knew from the beginning would not return to Spain while the French governor, there were those who already had worked out for the dignity and the future of their country, and decided to return to continue defrosting the system from within with gestures and magazines. It was not enough return visit (as Max Aub, Bunuel himself Manuel Altolaguirre), or could not be smuggled to fight back only from the more political conspiracy raw (as Jorge Semprun), but there was none, moderate, could be installed to give testimony is not normal, he had not, but the increasingly evident possibility of writing from Spain for democracy and values \u200b\u200bdefeated in 1939. This was, however brief, the case of Alberto Jiménez Fraud, which is, incidentally, one of the absences of a book that in any case, has no desire for completeness, but the sample, and from that point of view, exemplary. Not only helps to demonstrate that we have been calling "Silver Age" (label, like all others, simplified, but it is effective and fair) had an intellectual and creative extension between the English expelled but, symmetrically, insists that not everything had to wait until November 20, 1975. I had never stopped fighting to recover all lost in 1939, and achieved great victories and advances, but did not end with the regime, prepared several generations to live, finally freed from it.
( Review published in the Bulletin of the Free Institution of Education , No. 77 (July 2010), pp. 112-114).
0 comments:
Post a Comment