Memory and the Cycle of Violence in José Antonio Labordeta's En el remolino (2007)

Since the end of the twentieth century Spain has witnessed a boom in the production of films and publication of novels and books on the Spanish Civil War as part of a process known as the recovery of historical memory. While this is generally seen in positive terms, there is some disquiet about the potential for harm in too much remembering. This essay argues that it is important not just to remember past violence but to understand the nature of violence, and in particular the violence perpetrated in a civil war. En el remolino (2007) by José Antonio Labordeta is studied in the context of Stathis Kalyvas’ work on civil war violence and Judith Butler's notion of precarious lives as an illustration of both the potential dangers of memory and the need for democratic states to be built on a normative moral code which recognizes the worth of the individual.Keywords: José Antonio Labordeta En el remolino Spanish Civil Warliteratureviolencememorydemocracy Notes1 Barbara A. Misztal, ‘Memory and Democracy’, American Behavioral Scientist, 48:10 (2005), 1320–38 (p. 1336). See also Duncan Bell who has argued that ‘[m]emory can bind people as well as driving them apart, catalyse and sustain the search for justice as well as motivating violence’, in ‘Introduction: Violence and Memory’, Millenium. Journal of International Studies, 38:2 (2009), 345–60 (p. 358). And just as Susan Sontag has argued in the context of images of violence that ‘[t]he more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying’ (Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others [London: Penguin, 2003], 107), it might be argued that while it is generally ‘los nietos de la guerra’ who seem to show more interest in the Civil War at the beginning of the twentieth century, temporal distance can work in the same way as geographical distance.2 Madeleine Davis, ‘Is Spain Recovering Its Memory? Breaking the Pacto del Olvido’, Human Rights Quarterly, 27:3 (2005), 858–80 (pp. 875–76).3 Sarah Leggott, ‘Memory, Postmemory, Trauma: The Spanish Civil War in Recent Novels by Women’, Fulgor. Flinders University Languages Group Online Review, 4 (2009), 25–33 (p. 26).4 Anne L. Walsh, ‘The Inescapable Nature of Memory: The Case of El lápiz del carpintero (Manuel Rivas) and El vano ayer (Isaac Rosa)’, in Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea. War and Memory in Contemporary Spain, ed. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Roberta Ann Quance and Anne L. Walsh (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2009), 229–41 (p. 230). See also Francis Lough, ‘Aesthetics and the “Other” in Recent Novels of the Spanish Civil War’, BSS, 89:2 (2011), 233–52 (p. 252).5 David Herzberger, Narrating the Past. Fiction and Historiography in Postwar Spain (Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P., 1995).6 José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979), 115.7 Davis, ‘Is Spain Recovering Its Memory?’, 879.8 Damián A. González Madrid, ‘Violencia política y dictadura franquista’, Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism, 3 (2007), (accessed 3/11/2012).9 Madeleine Davis has argued in relation to recent events that ‘[t]he literal excavation of history in the form of thousands of hitherto unrecognized victims has revived these much more conflictual and polarized versions of the past and affords a long-overdue opportunity for their reevaluation’ (Davis, ‘Is Spain Recovering Its Memory?’, 877).10 Davis, ‘Is Spain Recovering Its Memory?’, 880.11 Santos Juliá, quoted in Javier Valenzuela, ‘El despertar tras la amnesia’, El País, 2002, sec. Babelia, (accessed 23/10/2012).12 Bell, ‘Introduction: Violence and Memory’, 345.13 William Pfaff, The Bullet's Song. Romantic Violence and Utopia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 132.14 Pfaff, The Bullet's Song, 6.15 Pfaff, The Bullet's Song, 282.16 ‘Never since has a cause so captured the moral and physical influence of so many makers and molders of the language, or created such relentless pressure upon as many members of the intellectual communities in the English-speaking world to take sides, to make a stand. No “Ban the Bomb” movement or crusade for Negro rights has been more than fractionally its equal in its impact upon writers and writing’ (Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Cause. The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War [New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968], 2).17 Pfaff, The Bullet's Song, 136.18 Bourke provides an illuminating study of how civilians are turned into combatants in order to commit acts of violence, the problems this involves and the difficulties of readjustment when the conflict is over; in Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing. Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Granta Books, 1999).19 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge U. P., 2006), 54.20 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 10.21 Edward Malefakis, ‘Democracy in Spain: Two Paradigms’, in The Making and Unmaking of Democracy. Lessons from History and World Politics, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Ezra N. Suleiman (London: Routledge, 2003), 89–108 (p. 76).22 Laura Desfor Edles, Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain. The Transition to Democracy after Franco (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge U. P., 1998), 5.23 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 14.24 Mark A. Mattaini, ‘Understanding and Reducing Collective Violence’, Behaviour and Social Science, 12 (2003), 90–108 (pp. 91–93).25 Derek Attridge, for example, who believes fully in the transformational power of literature, accepts that the literary text has a requirement to entertain (The Singularity of Literature [London: Routledge, 2004], 95–96, 108–09, 18–20.26 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature; Thomas Docherty, Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2006); Timothy O'Leary, Foucault and Fiction. The Experience Book (London/New York: Continuum, 2009).27 José Ovejero, La ética de la crueldad (Madrid: Anagrama, 2012), 22. Ovejero won the fortieth Premio Anagrama de Ensayo for this work. His use of the term ‘turista’ recalls Ortega y Gasset's view of the limited understanding associated with the tourist's eye: ‘Sin rozar ahora asunto de tan elevado rango, basta con que cada cual descubra en su propio pasado cuáles fueron las circunstancias en que aprendió más del mundo, y advertirá que no fueron aquellas en que se propuso deliberadamente ver y sólo ver. No es el paisaje que visitamos, como turistas, el que hemos visto mejor. Notorio es que, en últimas cuentas, el turista no se entera bien de nada. Resbala sobre la urbe o la comarca, sin oprimirse contra ellas y forzarlas a rendir gran copia de su contenido. Y, sin embargo, parece que, en principio, había de ser el turista, ocupado exclusivamente en contemplar, quien mayor botín de noticias lograse’ (‘Meditaciones sobre el Quijote’ e ‘Ideas sobre la novela’ [Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1975], 181).28 Ovejero, La ética de la crueldad, 25.29 Ovejero, La ética de la crueldad, 37.30 Ovejero, La ética de la crueldad, 44.31 José Antonio Labordeta, En el remolino (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2007). All references are to this edition.32 José-Carlos Mainer, ‘Presentación: José Antonio Labordeta, escritor’, in Labordeta, En el remolino, 7–19 (p. 13).33 Mainer, ‘Presentación’, 15–16.34 Mainer, ‘Presentación’, 15.35 Mainer, ‘Presentación’, 15.36 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 10.37 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 14.38 Ovejero, La ética de la crueldad, 51–52.39 The mechanism which underlies this paradox is described by Judith Butler in terms of the creation of a normative framework according to which ‘[l]ives are divided into those representing certain kinds of states and those representing threats to state-centered liberal democracy, so that war can then be righteously waged on behalf of some lives, while the destruction of other lives can be righteously defended’ (Judith Butler, Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? [London: Verso, 2009], 53).40 Pfaff, The Bullet's Song, 54. Pfaff cites the American philosopher Glenn Gray who has argued that war provides ‘an awareness of power that far surpasses [the soldier's] limited imagination [and] transports him into a state of mind unknown to his everyday experiences. Fleeting as these rapt moments may be, they are, for the majority of men, an escape from themselves that is very different from the escape induced either by sexual concourse or alcohol. The raptness is a joining and not a losing, a deprivation of self in exchange for a union with objects that were hitherto foreign’ (130).41 Pfaff, The Bullet's Song, 134–35.42 Butler, Frames of War, 52.43 Gonzalo Santonja, ‘Prólogo’, in Todo en el aire. Versos sin enemigo. Antología insólita de la poesía durante la guerra incivil española, ed. Gonzalo Santonja (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, Círculo de Lectores, 1997), 13–33 (p. 32).44 Butler, Frames of War, 42.45 Butler, Frames of War, 6.46 ‘It could be, as both Hegel and Klein point out in their different ways, that the apprehension of precariousness leads to a heightening of violence, an insight into the physical vulnerability of some set of others that incites the desire to destroy them. And yet, I want to argue that if we are to make broader social and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements to persistence and flourishing, we will first have to be supported by a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and the claims of language and social belonging’ (Butler, Frames of War, 2).47 Butler, Frames of War, 13.48 Butler, Frames of War, 14.49 Butler, Frames of War, 43.50 Butler, Frames of War, 13.51 Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain. The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 432.52 Ovejero, La ética de la crueldad, 54.53 Ovejero, La ética de la crueldad, 58.54 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), 76–77

Art · Humanities · History · Memory, violence, and history · Spanish Culture and Identity · Spanish History and Politics