In Madrid earlier this year I had the good fortune to pick up a second-hand copy of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's 1970 philosophical essay-play-poetry collection-novella Manifiesto subnormal, sadly long since out of print and as far as I know never translated into English. Vázquez Montalbán is of course best known for his Pepe Carvalho detective series, about the eponymous Catalán gastronome and ex-communist/ex-CIA (yes, such things are apparently possible!) private investigator.However Vázquez Montalban was also an astute cultural critic with many fascinating insights into Spain during the epoch of 'tardefranquismo' ('late Francoism') and subsequent 'transition' to liberal democracy as well as the world of Spanish far left politics, in which he was an active participant - beginning with his involvement with the Guevarist FLP in the 1960s and continuing with his lengthy career as a perennial dissident in the Unifed Socialist Party of Cataluña during the 70s and 80s (Vázquez Montalbán sided with the Eurocommunists during the PSUC's interminable faction fights but at the same time liked to satirise leading Euros such as Santiago Carillo - the 'born again' former hardline Stalinist - mercilessly). Vázquez Montalbán's collection of essays Crónica sentimental de la transición and his 1985 novel El pianista - charting the hopes, tragicomic failures and disillusionment of a generation of Spanish leftists - are essential reading for any serious student of the period.
Manifiesto is, as its publisher's blurb proudly proclaims, a book that is impossible to categorise in terms of genre. Nor is it easy to take away from it a neat didactic message, since the author characteristically satirises even those philosophical positions which he himself would be most inclined to defend. At the heart of it though is a call for leftists to overturn the time-honoured equation of Reason and rational philosophy with revolutionary politics and art and to celebrate instead what Vázquez Montalbán refers to as "la subnormalidad" and "la consciencia subnormal" - terms which I am not quite sure how to translate because nowhere does the author actually explicitly define them, but is perhaps closest to the standpoint of the Surrealist school in its delight in the irrational and absurd.
As Vázquez Montalbán writes "the prestige of Reason has been one of the cultural institutions most firmly established by the bourgeoisie" - and with good reason, since it encourages artists and philosophers to abstract themselves from reality - a reality that will now be mediated through the obfuscticating lens of ideology and false unity. Capitalism has also devised a system - humanist liberal democracy - which is capable of embracing and co-opting its own Hegelian artisitc antithesis, the aesthetic of desencanto or disillusionment, so long as it agrees to play by capitalism's own house rules. Vázquez Montalbán's message is that artists and would-be revolutionaries should try to resist this process of co-option or "recuperación" from "subnormalidad" into the capitalist cultural industry, although he is quite frankly pessimistic about the chances of success.
In the theatrical farce which forms the central section of the book, a dialogue plays out between a number of characters including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Theodor Adorno, Leonid Brezhnev, the Marx brothers as well as an anonymous narrator (whose views seem more akin to the Stalinist cultural operative Lukács than to Vázquez Montalbán himself - as evidenced by the condemnation of surrealism as "a false cultural terrorism that distracted the attention of philistines from the new literature of social protest influenced by Naturalism"!!).
In what follows, it is Theodor Adorno who emerges in the most sympathetic light. In response to Cohn-Bendit's simplistic revolutionary street-theatre and the narrator's defence of the doctrine of Third Period Stalinist "social-fascism" Adorno declares that he has broken with all such "grand rationalisations" because he wants above all to survive and sees little chance of the socialist revolution succeeding. As he says "without doubt the old dame [capitalism] will pass away, but she will have lived long enough to corrupt both her children and her antagonists."
Summing up, Adorno seems to echo Vázquez Montalbán's exhortations in favour of "subnormalidad" as he proclaims "Reason has prostituted itself - long live Feeling!"
Manolito Vázquez Montalbán: ensayista político y mediático de un dogmatismo estalinista casi entrañable de puro anticuado; novelista mediocre, facilón y best sellero; poeta horrísono... Malhumorado, pesetero, melancólico, de carácter más gallego (sus orígenes)que catalán. Nunca nos perdonó a sus contemporáneos que su PCE/PSUC fracasara en democracia, y menos aún que hasta sus camaradas le tuvieran por un ser pequeño y bastante ridículo.
ReplyDeleteUn personaje en suma muy corriente en una cierta Barcelona pequeñoburguesa de las décadas de los años 60 y los 70, y hoy completamente olvidado.
Un saludo.
Hola Joaquim
ReplyDeleteestoy un poco sorprendido por su descripción de Vázquez Montalbán como "estalinista" porque tuve la impresión que, durante su periodo de afiliación con el PSC, él militó en las filas de los eurocomunistas y no en las de los dogmatistas. Además, su novela "El pianista" muestra una actitud muy favorable hacia el POUM...
Por cierto Vázquez Montalbán fue muy desencantado con la España que salí a la luz en la estela de la llamada 'Transición', la España de Felipe González y el "socialismo del mercado" (o más bien de Enrique Tierno Galván y Pedro Almodóvar), pero imagino que en este compartían la mayoría de la izquierda española, ¿o tal vez me he equivocado?
Querido amigo, en la crisis del PSUC (los comunistas catalanes) Vázquez Montalbán se alineó claramente con los llamados "leninistas", el sector que encabezaba Paco Frutos (más tarde secretario general del PCE, y que supuestamente pretendían mantener las "esencias" comunistas frente a los eurocomunistas. Manolito odiaba especialmente a Santiago Carrillo, a quien consideraba responsable de la autodestrucción del PCE. El argumento de una novelita suya de mucho éxito en esos años, "Asesinato en el Comité Central", constituye una pequeña venganza de Vázquez Montalbán contra Carrillo.
ReplyDeleteEn realidad, y como la mayoría de sus camaradas "intelectuales orgánicos" del PCE, Vázquez Montalbán dejó de ser comunista si alguna vez lo fue muchos años antes de la Transición. Ocurre que era un hombre necesitado de referentes fuertes; un ser inseguro, adherido a una causa política como el ciego se agarra a su bastón. En la intimidad de su gente resultaba un ser bastante patético incluso para quienes le guardaban afecto, que no eran muchos aunque sí los había.
En cuanto a su presunto "cariño" por el POUM, baste decir que Vázquez Montalbán consideraba al NKVD una especie de Liga de RobinHoods envueltos en un aroma de romanticismo exaltado y sacrificio por la causa; cuando escribía estas tonterías, allá por los 70 y primeros 80, ya ocasionaban perplejidad. Recuerdo un articullo suyo sobre cierta sicaria rusa del NKVD de los años 20 cuyo nombre no recuerdo, pero que al parecer se paseaba por París conjugando la lucha revolucionaria con el glamour y el champagne, algo que francamente daba vergüenza ajena leer.
Vázquez Montalbán fue un obcecado que no pudo soportar la idea de que todo su mundo, décadas de de carnet comunista, se había ido irremisiblemente a la mierda. Un personaje al que nunca perdonó por eso es precisamente Felipe González; para Manolito, González era el hombre que se habría cruzado entre el PCE y la hegemonía política de la izquierda española.
Un saludo cordial.
joaquim! y tu desde donde te sacas las verdades? posibilista de la primera hora o que?
ReplyDeleteIt is strongly and curiously in the jaded, burnt-out, so-what spirit of Pepe Carvalho that his last days were spent on the opposite side of the world, at a literary festival in Auckland in 2003. He was returning home when he died suddenly, apparently of a heart attack, during a stopover at Bangkok Airport. I'd like to meet someone who talked with Montalban during his visit to Auckland - cultural connections of that potency are to relished.
ReplyDelete