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  • Labanyi - Jo - Myth and History in The Contemporary Spanish Novel

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    Michael Cantu
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    This document discusses how myth was used by Nationalist Spain after the Spanish Civil War to justify their victory and consolidate power. It explores how the fascist Falange movement viewed Spanish history as a deviation from an "authentic" origin and aimed to return Spain to this mythical past. The notion of returning to origins through violence and death in order to be reborn was a key part of Falangist ideology. While the fascist appeal to myth promised unity and a return to a lost wholeness, in practice it resulted in the suppression of separatist movements and a consolidation of Franco's authoritarian rule.

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    Labanyi - Jo - Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel

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    This document discusses how myth was used by Nationalist Spain after the Spanish Civil War to justify their victory and consolidate power. It explores how the fascist Falange movement viewed Spanish history as a deviation from an "authentic" origin and aimed to return Spain to this mythical past. The notion of returning to origins through violence and death in order to be reborn was a key part of Falangist ideology. While the fascist appeal to myth promised unity and a return to a lost wholeness, in practice it resulted in the suppression of separatist movements and a consolidation of Franco's authoritarian rule.

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    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    Download as pdf or txt
    312 views11 pages

    Labanyi - Jo - Myth and History in The Contemporary Spanish Novel

    Uploaded by

    Michael Cantu
    This document discusses how myth was used by Nationalist Spain after the Spanish Civil War to justify their victory and consolidate power. It explores how the fascist Falange movement viewed Spanish history as a deviation from an "authentic" origin and aimed to return Spain to this mythical past. The notion of returning to origins through violence and death in order to be reborn was a key part of Falangist ideology. While the fascist appeal to myth promised unity and a return to a lost wholeness, in practice it resulted in the suppression of separatist movements and a consolidation of Franco's authoritarian rule.

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    Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel jo LABANYI Seo Lace, Biskbeck Cavey of Loran CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge Naw York New Rochelle Melbourne Sydney Roo208 48102 2 Myth and Nationalist Spain ‘An understanding of the role played by myth in provoking the Civil ‘War and consolidating Nationalist victory is essential to an under- standing ofits use by writers in the postwar period. As in the case of| fascism in Italy and Germany, the ideology of the Spanish fascist movement Falange Espafiola was based on the mythical notion that the nation’s history was an inauthentic deviation from origins. Fascism would ‘save’ the nation by returning it to its ‘essential nature’. This mythical view of history was not a borrowing from Ialian and German fascism, as Spanish fascist thinkers rightly stressed, but can be traced back to the analysis of Spain's ‘deca- dence’ undertaken by the so-called 1898 Generation and by Ortega y Gasset. In En foro al castciono (1895), Unamuno had divided the ‘sea of history” into the ‘superficial waves of change’ and the ‘eternal tradition’ ~represented by the folk~ lying in its depths. Unamnuno’s insistence on the need to plunge into the depths of the ocean (the ‘pucblo) reads like a version of the Jungian quest myth in which the hhero plunges into the depths of the collective unconscious." In his Hearium expatel (1897), Ganivet likewise divided Spanish history, not into an ‘above’ and a ‘below’, but into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, creating the same mythical dissociation between an inauthentic history and authentic origins. Ganivet suggested that the nation’s course since 1492 (the beginning of imperial expansion) had been a ‘mistake’ or ‘deviation’ from its essential ‘territorial spirit’, to which it must return, His view that the territorial spirit’ had determined, not what happened in Spanish history, but what should happened but didn’, makes it clear that his pretence of positivistic ‘geographical determinism is a mask for mythical thinking. In Meditaciones del Quijote (1914), Ortega would similarly advocate the need to buen’ the ‘dross of Spain’s historical past in order to recover 35 MYTH AND HISTORY “the primary substance of the race’, ‘the iridescent gem of the Spain that might have been’ Such ideas enabled the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, to insist ‘we love Spain because we don’t like her’, ing a rejected historical reality from an ‘authentic’ ‘origi nal’ Spain, The Falangist intellectual Pedro Lain Entralgo, twisting ge eye ales substance is eternity’, The avant-garde writer Giménez Caballero, the major literary exponent of fascist thought in Spain, made explicit the equation of history with the Fall by calling José Antonio the “Agnus Dei qui tolls peccata Hispaniae’. In his book Bipata y Franco (1938) he would compare Franco's smile to the Virgin's mantle holding out the promise of redemption; while in an article of 1937 he Against a besieged Republican Madrid as a biblical Sodom and ‘whore of Babylon’ paying the price for her sins. His best- known work Gena de Espate (1932) set out to denounce ‘three centuries of bastardization’, calling for the ‘cleansing’ ofthe nation from the ‘drugs’ that had ‘poisoned? its soul, and a return to “the genital root of the n Franco's sister Pilar would give characteristically blunt expression to the notion that Nationalist victory had ‘cured’ Spain from the ‘sicknes: of history when she declared: ‘Ortega y Gasset diagnosed Spain as invertebrate; my brother tried to fit her with an orthopaedic corset.’ Just as Mussolini had said that ‘Today, in Italy, we are not living the time of history but of myth’, so the Falangist Rafael Garcia Serrano would say in ggg: ‘We shall create a new mythology, which this time will be fullbloodedly romantic." Fascism is indeed the ultimate expression of the Romantic appeal to myth in that it takes literally and puts into practice the urge to ‘undo’ history and return to origins. The Romantic longing to recover lost purty finds its political equivalent in the Comisiones de Depuracion (‘Purification Committees’ set up in all walks of life after Nationalist victory.s The notion that Spanish history since the Catholic gs had bbeen a long process of decadence led to the conclusion that the ration must undergo a ‘sacrificial death’ to hasten ‘rebirth’. The 36 MYTH AND NATIONALIST SPAIN Nationalist ‘myth of the Crusade’ has been savagely demolished by Herbert Southworth.* Franco himself would betray the reality behind the myth of a return to spiritual values when he declared ‘Our Crusade is the only struggle in which the rich who went to war ceame out of it rcher."? The cult of sacrificial death and its corollary of rebirth is a salient feature of Falangist ideology. The Moroccan divisions. under Franco's command proclaimed themselves the ‘Bridegrooms of Death’; ther rallying ery *Viva la muerte’ expresses, the notion that death is the pre-requisite to salvation. In Genio de Espana, Giménez Caballero asserted that the ‘true, eternal life’ of a nation is embodied in its dead, going on to demand a ‘resurrection’ of the national soul. The book ends with its author in Nietzschean fashion heralding the fiery sunset over the Monte de El Pardo in Madrid - his Mount Tabor’ - as an annunciation of the apocalyptic battle to come.* The terms ‘youth’, ‘dawn’, ‘spring’ recur through- ‘out Genio de Espata, as throughout Falangist ideology in general. The words of the Falangist anthem ‘Cara al sol proclaim that the blood of the fallen heroes will ‘blossom’ in a new ‘spring’. José Antonio ‘would encourag: the ideal of heroic death by insisting that the future Spain would be built on ‘the blood of our dead’, and that ‘death is an act of service’ His mystical conception of violence as the prelude to as ‘half-soliders half-monks’. Franco would dedicate his, script Raze (whose thesis is the need to return to ‘essential’ racial virtues) “To the youth of Spain, whose blood paved the way for our rebirth.'* By ‘rebirth’ José Antonio had in mind a return to i ‘what Franco meant was a return to purity in the __sense of puritanism, Despite the Nietzschean streak that remained in ‘Nationalist ideology even after the war - when propaganda was put in the hands of the Falange-it was the Francoist and official The tension between the Nietzschean and the classical strands of the ‘modernist appeal to myth come to the surface in the growth and final emasculation of Spanish fascism. ‘The political ambiguity of the fascist appeal to myth was io fact its ‘main attraction, allowing it to claim that it transcended the divisions ight and Left, restoring the nation to a lost ‘organic wholeness’. The emphasis on ‘unity'—which in practice meant the suppresion of regional separaisfmovements~is entirely in kerping \ 37\, MYTH AND HISTORY. with the appeal to myth as a source of wholeness. The original Falange— before its domestication by Franco on his assumiption of overall command of Nationalist forces in 1987 ~ was, like its original alian and German counterparts, oppored both to communism and to capitalism. {1 mobilized Right-wing Spposition to the modifica: tion of traditional clas structures at the same time as appealing to the popular notion of millenarian revolt. Not for nothing did the ‘Spanish peasantry divide its allegiance between fascism and anarch- jam: both movements with a strong millenarian appeal. The Falange promised to transcend class conflict by uniting employers and workers in state-controlled ‘vertical syndicate’ (the only part of the _2riginal Falangist platform that was put into effect under Franco). ‘Its dream was the return to a paternalistic feudalism in which the people seen as the repository of the nation’s spiritual values {would be ‘saved” from the divisive evils of progress and returned to ‘their ‘oneness’ with nature. The one concrete demand in Jose Antonio's political programme was for an agrarian reform that Would produce ‘a genuine return to Nature, notin the sense of the

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