Antonio Machado and the uses of Spanish history

As I've noted on other occasions (see for instance here and here) the poetry of the Spanish writer and "martyr" for the Republican cause Antonio Machado is both endlessly fascinating and, at the same time, deeply problematic in the way it manages to combine progressive leftist political sentiments with a Romantic attachment to symbols of Spain's imperialist past and ideas of Castillian supremacy. Yet, at the same time there is a powerful argument that poetry is not an exercise in instrumental reason and as such should be judged solely according to political criteria (a fact that I think also makes it hard to dismiss anti-rationalist philosophers such as Unamuno and Zambrano so hard to dismiss).

Looking down the River Dureo towards the Hermitage of San Saturio

I was reminded of this paradox during my visit last month to Soria, high up at the eastern end of the Castillian meseta near the headwaters of the River Duero, where Machado wrote his most famous collection of poems - Campos de Castilla - and where he met, married and then buried his young wife Leonor. While the strident literary nationalism that inhabits much of this collection is disconcerting, when actually physically confronted with the landscape which Machado describes in these poems it is difficult not to feel moved in a similarly irrational, 'Romantic' way... Somehow this desolate, rocky terrain - with its accumulated millenia of ruined cities, fortresses and monasteries - speaks to you in a way that the empty vistas of 'Godzone' can never even hope to aspire to...

The ruins of the 12th century monastery of San Juan del Duero

While the town of Soria itself is perhaps today a little too eager to cash-in on the legacy of its most famous resident (as evidenced by the 'Cervecería Machado' I encountered in the Calle de los Estudios which sold only Belgian beer...) and has lost some of its poetic 'lustre', a short walk across to the other side of the river you find yourself amidst the familiar vistas so beloved by the poet:

He vuelto a ver los álamos dorados,
álamos del camino en la ribera
del Duero, entre San Polo y San Saturio,
tras las murallas viejas de Soria - barbacana
hacia Aragón, en castellana tierra-.

Estos chopos del río, que acompañan
con el sonido de sus hojas secas
el son del agua, cuando el viento sopla,
tienen en sus cortezas
grabadas iniciales que son nombres
de enamorados, cifras que son fechas.
¡Alamos del amor que ayer tuvisteis
de ruiseñores vuestras ramas llenas;
álamos que seréis mañana liras
del viento perfumado en primavera;
álamos del amor cerca del agua
que corre y pasa y sueña;
alamos de las márgenes del Duero,
conmigo vais, mi corazón os lleva!

('Campos de Soria' VIII)

Along the banks of the river it is also possible to see the remains of the monastery of San Polo, which belonged to the Templar military order until their forcible dissolution in the 14th century, and about which the patron saint of Spanish Romanticism Gustavo Bécquer dedicated his gothic tales 'El Monte de los Ánimas' and 'El Rayo de Luna'.

The gatehouse of the monastery of San Polo, which sits astride the old road between San Juan del Duero and the Hermitage of San Saturio

In the midst of all this history, it is hard to begrudge Machado's appropriation of Castile's store of cultural and historical capital in the pursuit of his modernista literary project, even though the nationalist overtones make his poetry difficult to defend from an objective, political point of view. Perhaps the real problem for Machado (and his fellow Republican intellectuals) was not so much their tendency to appeal to nationalist sentimentality and a rose-tinted view of Spain's military past, but rather the fact that Franco's Nationalists were simply more credible representatives of this historical tradition. What was needed therefore was not so much a simple appeal to history but rather, as Juan Goytisolo advocates in his novel Juan sin tierra, a systematic re-writing or re-imagining of the national past, which promotes dissident figures such as Enrique IV (the reputedly - at least according to according to Gregorio Marañon - homosexual and morisco-phile half brother of Isabel 'la Católica') at the expense of the dominant "Golden Age" narrative handed down to us by authors such as Menéndez Pidal.

In this sense then, it might be said that the problem is not so much a surfeit of irrationality or Romanticism on the part of Machado, but rather that in his pursuit of these strategies he simply does not go far enough...

Postscript:

I couldn't conclude this brief soliloquy on Spanish left nationalism without mentioning the website of the Castilian federation of the Stalinist Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España, which amusingly fights for the self-determination of Castile (along with all the other "oppressed nations" of Spain) and 'liberation' from the rule of EU and US imperialism (since they view Spain as essentially an exploited neo-colony of these latter). Somewhat scarily, in large parts of provincial Spain (such as La Rioja, where I spent the majority of time during my recent trip to the Iberian peninsular) these guys seem to be just about the only organised far left force!

The history that europe would prefer to forget

Given the tide of anti-immigrant fervour sweeping Europe at the moment - as evidenced by the victory of Meisseurs Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Rajoy and their lesser brethren (Griffin, Wilders et al.) at last weekend's European elections - it seems like an opportune moment to repost the following article by Juan Goytisolo, originally published in El País back in March. Apologies to the reader for the roughness of my translation.


The inconvenient history of the Moriscos[1]

Official and academic Spain is trying to forget the fourth centenary of one of the most ominous deeds in our history: the expulsion in 1609 of hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen and women of Muslim descent.

- Juan Goytisolo El País 15/03/2009

To Francisco Márquez Villanueva

The past of all countries contains alternating moments of embarrassment and patriotic pride. The fourth centenary of the expulsion of the Moriscos in the reign of Philip III obviously belongs among the former. Outside of the Andalusí Legacy[2] foundation and the conference of historians it is organising this May, official and academic Spain has maintained a defensive position of diplomatic silence on this issue, revealing its obvious discomfort.

What happened from 1609 to 1614 was an inglorious episode that provided the first European precedent for the bloody ethnic cleansings (of various magnitudes) that we have witnessed over the past century. The “preventive” measures ordered by the Duke of Lerma[3] with the strong support of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and Patriarch Ribera[4] were the subject of a long, uncertain and controversial political-religious debate. It is useful to remind ourselves, albeit only briefly, of its various stages:

1499: forced conversion of the people of Granada by Cardinal Cisneros; 1501-02: Muslims in the Kingdom of Castile given a choice between exile and conversion: the mediaeval Mudéjares[5] became Moriscos pure and simple; 1516: forced to abandon their dress and customs, although the measure was not enforced for 10 years; 1525-26: conversion by edict of the Moriscos in Aragón and Valencia; 1562: a council of ecclesiastics, jurists and members of the Inquisition prohibits the people of Granada from using the Arabic language; 1569-70: rebellion of Alpujarra and the wars of Granada… from the crushing of the Moriscos to the execution of Aben Humeya, the political strategy of Philip II consisted of dispersing the people of Granada and resettling them in Castile, Murcia and Extremadura, far from the southern coasts and possible Turkish invasions.


So many vacillations and changes of direction reflect the contradictions that existed between an ecclesiastical hierarchy with scant respect for the universal Christian ethic on the one hand and on the other the interests of the peninsular nobility, for whom the expulsion of those who worked their lands would spell agricultural ruin. As we now know thanks to historiographical work carried out since the end of the 19th century, the political-religious crusade was the subject of a furious behind-the-scenes controversy.

While some opposed the expulsion and preached baptism and gradual assimilation, the hard-line elements of the episcopacy were strongly inclined towards more forceful proposals: slavery, collective extermination or castration of all the males and the deportation to the Island of Bacalao,[6] in other words to Newfoundland.

Banishment to the much closer African coast, favoured by the majority of the members of the Council of State, was opposed by a venerable bishop with an argument of impeccable logic: after arrival in Algeria or Morocco the Moriscos would renounce their Christian faith, the most charitable thing would therefore be to put them in leaking ships so that they would be shipwrecked during the voyage and their immortal souls be saved.

In the debate that for decades pitted doves against hawks, the hawks relied upon the eloquent pens of propagandists such as Brother Jaime de Bleda, González de Cellorigo, Brother Marcos de Guadalajara and, most importantly of all, Pedro Aznar de Cardona. – for whom the expulsion marked the closing of a long and ignoble historical digression opened by the invasion of 711: thanks to the work of Lerma and Philip III Spain would be Catholic without exception.

Along with their religious arguments, they put forward other ridiculous claims concerning demographics: the supposed danger of a giant increase in the Morisco population in abrupt contrast with a static or declining Christian one due to ecclesiastical celibacy, the cloistering of women in convents, the wars in Flanders and emigration to America. Such arguments, which are being revived today by the European nationalist ultras, were ironically summed up by the dog Berganza in Cervantes’ Symposium of the Dogs.[7]

The Morisco problem and the radical solution applied to it have been the subject of numerous well-documented studies in the last fifty years by historians as diverse as América Castro, Domínguez Ortiz, Julio Caro Baroja, Mercedes García-Arenal, Bernard Vincent, Louis Cardaillac, Márquez Villanueva, among many others. Thanks to these people we now know of the opposition of those whom today we would call courageous citizens to the edict of expulsion four hundred years ago. Very significantly, the majority of these people were recently converted Christians of Jewish origin – no less visible despite having altered their names and outward appearance. Their advocacy in favour of assimilation of the Moriscos was as much a plea on their own behalf and both contradicted and challenged the very recently introduced Christian statutes regarding limpieza de sangre.[8]

The reassertion of commerce, labour and merit against the “black honour” of the Old Christians offered some hope of arresting the already perceptible Spanish decline and the long “holiday from history” which was prolonged for another two centuries until the Cortes de Cádiz[9], despite the eminently sensible policies of Olivares[10] and the enlightened ministers of the 18th century.

Example of this reassertion include González de Cellorigo’s memorial addressed to the monarch Of the Necessary Policies and Useful Restoration of the Republic of Spain –its regenerationist spirit obvious from is title – and Luis de Mármol y Carvajal’s excellent History of the Rebellion and Punishment of the Moriscos – evocative of a human tragedy that could have been avoided with a more pragmatic approach. Both of these books helped to alter the current of Erasmean thought[11] to which the would-be modernisers of self-absorbed Spanish society subscribed.

In a soon-to-be-published work that I have just had the opportunity to read thanks to the kindness of the author – Moors, Moriscos and Turks in the Work of Cervantes – Francisco Márquez Villanueva analyses with his usual aplomb the writings – mostly unedited – of the humanist Pedro de Valencia, disciple and executor of the Hebrew scholar Benito Arias Montano. His Treatise Concerning the Moriscos in Spain, unknown until its publication in 1979 and which only came into my hands very recently, could be perhaps – seen from the perspective of its own time – the most reasoned defence of the cause of those who were expelled.

A convert from Judaism like Arias Montano and an enemy of the Church scholastics and the doctrines propounded by the Council of Trent,[12] de Valencia energetically denounced “the insult that is done (to the Moriscos) in depriving them of their lands and in not treating them with the same equal honour and esteem as all other natural-born citizens.” Like Brother Luis de León (he who is remembered for his famous description of the statute of limpieza de sangre as “an affront to generations that will never cease”), Pedro de Valencia opposed the statute of Cardinal Siliceo[13] and advocated a policy of mixed marriages between Moriscos and Old Christians in order to “persuade the country’s citizens that all of them are brothers of one lineage and one blood.”

Morisco refugees set sail from the Spanish port of Viñaroz, Valencia

The spectacle of tens of thousands of baptised men separated from their children while begging for mercy from God and the King and proclaiming in vain their desire to stay in the country of their birth was difficult for many sincere Christians to tolerate. The brutal nature of the expulsion and the massacres carried out on those who tried to avoid it were received with sadness and compassion by an intelligent minority, but with cries of hatred and spontaneous cheers by those like Gaspar de Aguilar who turned them into songs of heroic deeds.

The majority of the Moriscos took refuge – with varying success – in the Maghreb. The natives of Hornachos[14] set up the so-called republic of Salé in Morocco,[15] with the illusory hope of ingratiating themselves with the King and some day returning to Spain.

During a four-year relaxation those in the Ricote Valley[16] were allowed to voluntarily emigrate across the French frontier and travel on to other European countries. Although they had been completely assimilated, the Duke of Lerma signed without qualm their order of collective banishment in 1614. The episode of the Morisco of Ricote who in the second part of Don Quixote meets with Sancho Panza allowed Cervantes, a master in the art of cunning, to reclaim a voice for those who were victims of such a savage violation.

“I left our town – said the Morisco – entered France and although I was well-received there, I wanted to see it all. I went to Italy and Germany and there it seemed to me that one could live with more freedom, the inhabitants being a good-natured people: each one living as they wished, because for the most part there is freedom of conscience.”

Freedom of conscience! Almost casually and as if not even wanting to, the author of Don Quixote puts his finger on the problem. The agents of the Inquisition did their job well but to a good reader sometimes words are not needed.


________________________

[1] A term that has no direct equivalent in English, but refers to the Muslims living in Spain after the reconquista who converted to Christianity.

[2] Andalusí – person coming from al-Andalus/Spanish Muslim

[3] Don Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma (1552/1553-1625), courtier and favourite of Philip III

[4] Saint Juan de Ribera (1532-1611), Archbishop of Valencia and Patriarch of Antioch.
[5] Mudéjares: the name given to those Muslims living in Spain after the reconquista who did not or had not yet converted to Christianity.

[6] Mystery island in the Atlantic depicted on many 16th Century maps as lying just off the coast of Newfoundland.

[7] Reference to one of the Novelas Ejemplares or “exemplary novellas” by Miguel de Cervantes (published 1613) in which two dogs share their bemused observations on the contradictions and nonsensical elements in human society.

[8] “purity of blood” i.e. favouring of those of pure Christian descent.

[9] The Cortes of Cádez met in 1810 during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and the detention of King Ferdinand VII in France. It promulgated Spain’s first liberal constitution, which provided for a limited constitutional monarchy ruling through parliament and universal male suffrage. It was repealed by Ferdinand after his restoration in 1813.

[10] Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, Count of Olivares (1587-1645) was prime minister for 22 years under Philip IV.

[11] Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69-1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist and Catholic theologian.

[12] Ecumenical council of the Catholic Church which took place in the middle of the 16th century, at the height of the Counter-Reformation drive against Protestantism and other “heresies” in the Church.

[13] Juan Martínez Guijarro (1477-1557), Archbishop of Toledo and intellectual author of the statute of limpieza de sangre.

[14] A town in Extremadura near Badajoz.

[15] A small maritime republic that existed for a brief period during the 16th century encompassing the cities of Salé and Rabat.

[16] In Murcia, south-east Spain

Jean Genet: the writer as a perpetual exile

The second volume of Juan Goytisolo's autobiography, Realms of Strife (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990 - trans. Peter Bush) contains a very moving tribute to the French poet, novelist and playwright Jean Genet (1910-1986) - whose life in many ways parallels that of the Spanish writer.

Genet was the orphaned son of a prostitute who grew up to become a vagrant, military deserter and petty thief and was only saved from a life sentence of imprisonment in 1948 (after over 10 convictions) by the intervention of André Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre (among others) who recognised the extent of his creative talents.

His works reveal a powerful fascination and empathy with people existing at the margins of society such as criminals, homosexuals and immigrants.

Goytisolo was introduced to Genet soon after his arrival in Paris in 1956 by Monique Lange of the publishing house Gallimard, and from there began a relationship that was to have a powerful influence over Goytisolo's own subsequent political and literary evolution.

Like Goytisolo, Genet was a homosexual who was initially attracted to the Arab countries of the Maghreb because of the relatively more uninhibited notions of masculinity in North African society (despite the dominance of Islam).

From this initial point of attraction Genet became more deeply involved both personally and politically in the Arab world - defending Algerian migrant workers against police brutality in France and traveling to meet with Palestinian freedom fighters in Lebanon.

He was then an exile in every sense of the word.

In his memoirs Goytisolo recounts the time he lent Genet a copy of the poems of Antonio Machado, a writer with whom Genet was not then acquainted but who had the status of a kind of secular saint among the Spanish Republican exiles abroad:

He returned the books to me after a few days and rattled off a string of criticisms: he thought the writer's human and literary horizons narrow and limited; his obsession with Castile was a way of narcisistically contemplating his own navel and resurrecting the retrograde values of the countryside. Machado not only wrote in Spanish - as Genet wrote in French - but wanted to be Spanish, a cultural identification that Genet could not understand and labeled as chauvinist. He was left totally indifferent by the moral landscape of France: neither the gardens of Versailles nor the cathedral of Rheims stirred any emotions in him. So why, then, that love of Soria, Castile, the trees on the riverbank, the slow procession of poplars? The fatherland, he would say much later, could only be an ideal for those who didn’t have one, like the Palestinian fedayeen.

Goytisolo concludes his tribute with the following account of his friend's death some 30-odd years later:

He met his end on one of those short trips to the France he so hated, when he wished to correct the proofs of his last book, Un Captif amoureux. His wish to be buried in Morocco, to leave no trace of himself in his country apart from his beautiful, repellent, and poisoned prose, apparently complicated the formalities of the funeral. As with Abdallah twenty years before, his body remained several days in the morgue; and as Abdallah blackened by poison had returned to his African origins, Genet would in turn be reintegrated symbolically in his adoptive land: as I later learned from his Palestinian friends, the customs official asked those accompanying the coffin whether it was the body of a Moroccan worker. They proudly proclaimed it was.

Finally, Goytisolo notes that

Genet taught me to cast off my early vanity, political opportunism, my desire to cut a figure in the life of literary society…Without him, without his example, I would perhaps not have had the strength to break from the hierarchy of values accepted on the right and the left by my compatriots, to accept proudly my predictable rejection and isolation, to write all I have written from the time of Conde Julián.

St Paul and the imperative of group orthodoxy/infallibility

Tying together rather neatly two themes canvassed on this blog recently - intra-left sectarianism and the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo - I came across this passage in Goytisolo's memoirs recently which I found quite thought-provoking:

The obsession of Communist parties and revolutionary groups with labelling those who differ from them as "lackeys of imperialism" or "agents of the Pentagon" does not date back, as I thought for a time, to the particular historical conditions in which the Marxist and non-Marxist working class movements were shaped and structured before the victory of the Bolshevik revolution: it is a response to a series of social and psychological factors that, as I would be shown by a reading of Blanco White, have their roots through the centuries in notions of orthodoxy, absolutism and infallibility - the fruits of Saint Paul rather than Marx - firmly anchored in human nature. "Individuals organized professionally in an orthodox body will resist and sanction with every means any attempt to dissolve the vital principle behind their union. And as a consistent political body, an orthodox Church will easily realize that nothing binds groups of humans together better than their opposition to the rest...Hence the fact that condemnation of the latter is the real essence of orthodoxy."* A rigidly hierarchical party will thus have recourse, as Blanco prophesies, to the simple expedient of marking out those who are not in communion with them with some vile or sectarian label...

The future designation as "intellectual bourgeois agents," "shameless pseudoleftists," and "minor agents of capitalism" bestowed by the great Cuban leader in 1971 on Sartre and a group of writers politically aligned with him would again confirm the deep-rootedness of the old custom, but I was not then surprised or upset. My involvement in the political world in my first years of hardened self-exile had revealed the abuses of such a mechanism ad nauseam and I was, you might say, inoculated against such terror.

*See Obra inglesa de Blanco White (Buenos Aires, 1972), 256-263

- Forbidden Territory: the Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo 1931-1956 (trans. Peter Bush) pp. 203-4

While not necessarily subscribing to the idea that there exists such a thing as abstract "human nature", I think that Goytisolo's observations do contain a real kernel of insight in terms of the way in which inner and intra-group dynamics play out on the political left (as well as in society generally).

While the labels may vary (the Maoists' favorite pejorative being "revisionist" or "objectively counter-revolutionary", the Trotskyists - my own tradition - preferring instead "bourgeois intellectual" or "cliquist") the underlying phenomenon is the same - the need to believe that the project we are all engaged in is objectively vital and representing more than just our own subjective hopes or desires, hence no questioning of its validity can be countenanced.

I remember being puzzled some months ago when reading in the New York Review of Books about a recent work by the French neo-marxist philosopher Alain Badiou entitled "St Paul: the Foundation of Universalism". At the time I wondered why on earth the doyenne of the French New Left would be interested in such an esoteric subject, however upon reflection Badiou's characterisation of St Paul as the Christian equivalent to Lenin does make a great deal of sense.

While I admit I haven't read more than the introduction to Badiou's book (such is the impenetrable nature of his prose - like that of French academics in general), his basic contention appears to be that St Paul's role in the history of the Christian church was to place it upon a "universalist" foundation overcoming the various frontiers of language and legal jurisdiction and in so doing creating a new community that transcended the pre-existing multitude of fractured identities (perhaps analogous to the state of the world under global capitalism today).

However quite clearly St Paul's "universalism" is primarily a vehicle to further the propagation of an idea that in its origins and epistemological status is purely subjective i.e. Christianity.

What we can see therefore is that the impulse to "universalise" ideologies or belief-systems often stems from the need to compensate for their tenuous hold on empirical reality (perhaps that is why the Healyites and their latter-day successors the World Socialist Website make such a big deal about the "science" of dialectics - a concept towards which I have always felt fairly dubious)!

This is not necessarily to say that the political ideology of Marxism is only a subjective whim or has no objective basis (although Goytisolo would probably beg to differ) - rather it suggests to me that those political groups within the Marxist left which are the least secure in their foundations are often the most shrill in their denunciations of others (the obvious religious corollary of the WSWS would be the Christian fundamentalists).

In this way I think it is possible to conclude that those groups which feel the need to rationalise the departure of members from their ranks as proving that they have succumbed to defeatism/alien class forces/the devil etc reveal no more than their own intrinsic weakness and insecurity.

Count Julian's revenge

Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo (trans. Helen Lane)

(continued from previous post)

While each nation has had its legendary betrayers in history - the Athenians had Alcibiades, the Romans Coriolanus - arguably none was as spectacularly successful as the Spanish Count Julian.

Count Julian the novel consists of a series of interwoven experiences, childhood memories, dreams and drug-fueled hallucinations of a Spanish exile living in Tangiers who looking across the Straits of Gibraltar that separate him from his homeland is filled with an overwhelming sense of loathing, such that he imagines himself as the great betrayer - Count Julian himself - leading the Arab army of invasion to the sack of Christian Spain.

Goytisolo prefaces the novel with the following quotation from Luis García de Valdeavellano's Historia de Espana:

In their struggle against the Byzantines and the Berbers, the Arab chieftains had greatly extended their African dominions, and as early as the year 682 Uqba had reached the shores of the Atlantic, but he was unable to occupy Tangier, for he was forced to turn back toward the Atlas Mountains by a mysterious person whom the Moslem historians almost always refer to as Ulyan, although his real name was probably Julian, or perhaps Urban or Ulbán or Bulian. Soon thereafter he became a legendary figure known as "Count Julian". We are not certain whether he was a Berber, a Visigoth, or a Byzantine; as a "count" he may have been the ruler of the fortress of Septem, once part of the Visigoth kingdom; or he may have been an exarch or a governor ruling in the name of the Byzantine Empire: or as appears more likely, he may have been a Berber who was the lord and master of the Catholic tribe of Gomera...

Goytisolo's style takes some getting used to - he avoids the use of full stops and paragraph breaks so that the text appears as one neverending stream-of-consciousness, a kind of Latin Ulysses. The task of the translator Helen Lane in handling this work is therefore one that cannot be underestimated.

Many of Goytisolo's own personal experiences are blended into the narrative - mainly scenes of human cruelty from his childhood spent in 1940s Francoist Spain which also resurface in his memoirs. However despite sharing many aspects of his personality and background (up to and including his self-imposed exile in Morocco) with Goytisolo, the nameless protagonist represents an extension beyond Goytisolo the writer. For example as our exiled Spaniard delights in fantasies of sexual violence perpetrated by the Arab armies he imagines overrunning Spain, it is clear that he is channeling the Marquis de Sade, while at other points in the narrative he seems in equal parts José de Espronceda and Miguel de Cervantes.

The protagonist desires the complete destruction of Spain - physical, political, linguistic and literary. He imagines a variety of ways in which this destructive intent can be encompassed - ranging from the fanciful (ordering the removal from the Spanish language of all words of Arabic etymology) to the truly bizarre (contracting rabies and donating his blood to be used in Spanish hospitals).

He fulminates not only against the Francoist dictatorship but the entire Spanish weltanschauung, symbolised for him by the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca (who we are reminded Nietzsche called "the torreador of virtue) and who our protagonist imagines was not born in Corduba as the historical accounts maintain (which would open him up to the suspicion that he was not of "pura sangre") but rather in the very heart of Castille, in the village of Madrigal de las Altas Torres - the birthplace of Queen Isabella "the Catholic" located in the Sierra de Gredos mountains.

The weary fatalism that he perceives in the Spanish collective psyche is further underlined by the frequent jibes at the figure of Platero, the donkey in the poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez who exhibited an enormous capacity for blind, trusting faith (a positive quality for Jiménez, obviously not so for the protagonist who imagines meeting the inoffensive creature and slitting its throat with a knife).

Elsewhere in the novel the Spanish obsession with racial purity is represented by the continuous praising of the Castillian ibex or capra hispanica by Don Álvaro Peranzules (an obvious caricature of General Franco). Yet the protagonist also feels nothing but contempt for the erstwhile progressive Spanish intellectuals, the partisans of racio-vitalismo and heirs of Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset who claim to oppose Franco:

at literary gatherings and cocktail parties, in arty cafés and elegant salons, men of letters are carefully tending the flame of the brightly glowing Torch of Generations: sons, grandsons, great-grandsons of the giants of '98, bards celebrating the immutable flora of the steppes, the Hispanic essence that has stood the test of centuries: statues who do not yet have a pedestal, but are already masters of the art of tauromachic pedestal...

Of course, these same intellectuals during the Spanish Civil War delighted in stoking the fires of patriotic nationalism against the colonial Moroccan troops used by General Franco and the Nationalists - demonising the alien other instead of seeing them as a people oppressed by Spanish imperialism who could potentially won to the Republican cause.

However in the final analysis Count Julian is not just a Spanish story but a universal one - as the protagonist tells us:

one's homeland is the mother of all vices: in order to be cured of it as rapidly and completely as possible, the best remedy is selling it, betraying it: selling it?: for a mess of potage or for all of Peru, for a great deal or for almost nothing: to whom?: to the highest bidder: or giving it, as a gift filled with poison, to someone who knows nothing about it and does not care to know anything: a rich man or a poor one, a man who is indifferent or one hopelessly in love: for one simple but sufficient reason: the pleasure of betraying...what homeland?: all of them: those of the past, the present, and the future...selling one's homeland into bondage, an endless chain of sales...an unending crime, permanent and active betrayal...

It is this fundamentally irrational yet somehow heroic (or anti-heroic?) sentiment which I think makes Count Julian such a powerful work - worthy of comparison with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great or Milton's Paradise Lost.

Together these works could form the basis perhaps for a course to be taken in conjunction with all the papers on nationalism and "nation-building" that currently infest our institutions of higher learning, to be entitled "Anti-Patriotism 101".

Juan Goytisolo: the journey into exile

...Castillian in Catalonia, Frenchified in Spain, Spanish in France, a Latin in North America, nesrani in Morocco, and a Moor everywhere, as a result of my wanderings, I would become a writer not claimed by anybody, alien and opposed to groupings and categories...outside the bounds of abstract ideologies, systems, or entities always characterised by their self-sufficiency and circularity.

- Coto Vedado/Forbidden Territory: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo 1931-1956
(trans. Peter Bush)


In the course of my literary perambulations (see previous post) I recently discovered the work of the Catalan-Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, a writer whose name it seems is hardly known in the Anglophone world despite the existence of several excellent English-language translations of his novels.

Goytisolo is a fascinating figure, in that while he has chosen to spend almost his entire adult life living outside of Spain much of his literary work is characterised by a near-total obsession with the land of his birth. Despite living in Morocco, he also still manages to write a regular column for the newspaper El País (for whom he worked as a war correspondent during the 1990s in Bosnia and Chechnya).

Goytisolo is a man of contradictions - he grew up in Barcelona during the 1930s and 40s in an impoverished bourgeois household whose forebears had been the owners of vast sugar plantations (and hundreds of slaves!) in Cuba. Goytisolo's father was a strong Catholic and ardent supporter of General Francisco Franco, however the revelation that his mother's death in 1938 had been due to a Nationalist bombing raid alienated Goytisolo from his father (who had suppressed the truth and always blamed his wife's death on "the Reds").

An additional factor impelling Goytisolo's journey towards exile was his alienation from Spanish culture and the Spanish language, a reaction provoked as Goytisolo says in his memoirs by "the ignorant, small-minded priests" (the Jesuits) who educated him. As a result, he did not even read Cervantes until he was in his late 20s.

In 1956 Goytisolo went into voluntary exile in Paris, France and was soon associated with the leading cultural and literary figures of the French Communist Party. He also became an enthusiastic supporter of the Cuban Revolution, but after a number of visits there he became disillusioned with the Castro regime. In his memoirs he tells of giving a speech at a secondary school in Havana as the invited guest of the Cuban poet Navarro Luna, arriving just as some girls were being publicly censured in front of the entire assembly for being lesbians. Goytisolo describes the overwhelming feeling of hypocrisy he felt as he went onto the platform to give his address

...I, that juan goytisolo suddenly ashamed of his role, of the unbridgeable abyss opened at a stroke between reality and words, overwhelmed by the tumultuous applause for the imposter who has usurped his name...

Goytisolo was discovering at around the same time that he himself was a homosexual, although despite finally confessing as much to his partner Monique Lange in 1965 they maintained an "open relationship" and even later married.

Goytisolo published a number of novels throughout the 1950s and 60s to a modest level of critical acclaim, while at the same time working for the French publishing house Gallimard (in the course of which he came to befriend writers such as the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Cuban Cabrera Infante). However, it was with his Álvaro Mendiola trilogy (published between 1966-1975) that he really made his name. The second book of that trilogy in particular - Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (published in English as "Count Julian") - stands (albeit a little ironically as we shall see!) as a masterpiece of Spanish literature and the ultimate condensation of Goytisolo's personal, philosophical and political thought.

To be continued...

The Other Count Julian

Tariq the conqueror of al-Andalus laying his conquests at the feet of the Umayyad viceroy

It is funny how sometimes a line or fragment of a poem can lead you off on the most circuitous yet interesting of intellectual tangents.

I had this experience a couple of years ago when I was reading the through some of the Civil War poetry of Antonio Machado - the Spanish modernist writer and contemporary of Unamuno and Azorín - and came across a sonnet entitled "A Otro Conde Don Julian" ("to the other Count Julian").

The poem itself, which is far inferior to Machado's earlier works such as those found in his collection Campos de Castilla (Lands of Castile) and of primarily propagandistic rather than literary significance, held little interest to me - but the title, which casts the nationalist leader General Franco in the role of the arch-betrayer of Spanish history Count Julian of Ceuta held a strange fascination.

My knowledge of the half legendary, half historical figure of Count Julian was derived from my early-adolescent reading of Walter Scott's "The Vision of Don Roderick" which with Scott's customary poetic licence recounts the story of the last Visigothic King of Spain and his defeat at the hands of the Moorish invaders (Sir Walter Scott, along with the Romances of King Arthur and Charlemagne, informed most of my 12-year-old world view).

In the poetic account of the fall of Visigothic Spain, King Roderic is betrayed by Count Julian, the governor of the Christian outpost of Ceuta which lies on the North African coastline at the closest point to the Spanish shore (the Romans knew it as the city of Septem). The reasons suggested for Julian's betrayal are many and varied - some say it was because Roderic raped one of Julian's daughters who was a hostage at the Visigothic Court in Toledo, others that Julian was the protector of the sons of the previous Visigothic King Wittiza, whom Roderic was suspected of assassinating.

More recently, historians have suggested that Julian may have been a Byzantine Greek official who had only entered into a temporary alliance with the Visigoths after the fall of Carthage to the Umayyads in 695-698 and the departure of the last Roman troops. Given the fact that the Umayyads proved to be considerably more tolerant towards other religions and denominations than the formerly Arian Visigothic rulers (who with the zeal of recent converts to the one true faith were continually trying to prove their Catholic bona fides to the Pope by violently persecuting Jews and heretics) it is not inconceivable that Julian's decision to enter into an alliance with Musa ibn-Nusair, the Umayyad governor of the newly conquered Maghreb provinces was motivated simply by enlightened self-interest.

Whichever of these scenarios is correct, what is uncontested is that in the year 711 Julian provided the fleet which transported the Berber Umayyad general Tariq ibn-Ziyad and his troops across the narrow straits to the landing place which now bears Tariq's name - the Rock of Gibraltrar (from the Arabic "Jabal Tariq"), echoing the invasion of Republican Spain by General Franco at the head of the Army of Morocco in August 1936, some 1200 years later.

After the defeat of Roderic at the Battle of Gaudalete and the establishment of Umayyad rule in Spain, Julian was rewarded for his "act of treachery" with extensive lands and titles.

These then were some of the literary and historical associations that Antonio Machado's piece of Civil War propaganda rekindled in my head, leading me to look up again the story of the Fall of Visigothic Spain and in the course of this process to discover the work of a remarkable man - also an exile estranged from the political and religious order of Christian Spain, a modern day Count Julian living in Morocco - the novelist Juan Goytisolo.

To be continued...