Afinoguénova, Eugenia

English

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Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Spanish Languages and Literatures Research and Publications Languages, Literatures and Culture Faculty Research and Publications 6-2019 Review of By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination by William Viestenz Eugenia Afinoguénova Follow this and additional works at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/span_fac  Part of the Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons PAGE 128................. 19295$ REVS 04-19-19 11:40:40 PS128  Revista Hispánica Moderna 72.1 (2019) william viestenz. By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Polit-ical Imagination. U of Toronto P, 2015. 223 pp. As T-shirts of La Roja (currently less successful on the field than in the national imagination) and snapshots of Holy Week processions continue to dominate Spain’s brand image, it is hard to overestimate the usefulness of sacred or sancti-fied symbols in preserving Spanish nationalism in the age of official seculariza-tion. What happens, however, to this happy partnership of sovereignty and mystical unity when the state enshrines Catholicism itself to assert nationhood, as occurred during Franco’s regime? This is the question hovering over William Viestenz’s fascinating book as it looks back at the “Francoist alliance of the polit-ical and the theological” from the vantage point of present-day post-secularism (3). Jo Labanyi’s Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (1989) and Noel Valis’s Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (2010), which Viestenz cites among many others, have uncovered the impor-tance of fiction in supplying modern visions of sacred communities, subjects, objects, and values to soothe anxieties caused by Spain’s incomplete seculariza-tion. A welcome and well-informed addition to this body of work, Viestenz’s study approaches literature as a channel for “political imagination” that dis-rupted or reasserted Franco’s National-Catholicism by laying bare the inconspic-uous consequences of its rituals: the closure of time, the abolishing of mercy and grace, scapegoating, and other manifestations of exclusionary violence triggered by fear of contamination. Carefully avoiding simplistic conflation of the Catholic and the sacred, Vies-tenz’s research is grounded in Carl Schmitt’s assertion in Political Theology that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theo-logical concepts” (qtd. in Viestenz 4). Viestenz’s approach to “sacred nation-alism” is informed by thinkers ranging from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Marı́a Zambrano, from Hannah Arendt to Slavoj Žižek. Having succinctly explained in chapter 1 how nations are reified metaphysically as sacred entities and what literature has to do with it, the author turns, in chapter 2, to what he considers the pivotal moment when the “thinking of ‘Spanishness’ through religious terms” shifted to a metaphysical, superficially secularized “category of self-immanence”: the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regeneracionista discourse (12). The book’s subsequent chapters offer theoretically lucid and his-torically contextualized close readings of several texts, both canonical and little-known, written in either Spanish or Catalan by authors who worked in different parts of the Peninsula and in the diaspora: Incerta glòria by Joan Sales (1956– 1981) in chapter 3, Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián by Juan Goytisolo (1970) in chapter 4, Volverás a Región by Juan Benet (1967) and La mort i la primavera by Mercé Rodoreda (1961–1986) in chapter 5, Tiempo de silencio and Tiempo de des-trucción by Luis Martı́n Santos (1961 and 1975) in chapter 6, and, finally, Les hores, El caminant i el mur, Final del laberint, and La pell de brau—four books of poetry by Salvador Espriu (1952, 1954, 1955, and 1960, respectively) in chapter 7. As the author explains, such a “chronological span corresponds, not coinci-dentally, to a post-Second World War retrenchment within Francoist rhetoric of a sacred mandate to promote Spain’s Catholic first causes” (13). PAGE 129................. 19295$ REVS 04-19-19 11:40:41 PSReviews  129 The readings are well grounded in the author’s knowledge of the conditions of production and circulation of each text. The book’s main focus, however, are the characters, chronotopes, plots, and language that reveal how fictional communities are bound together by processes of exclusion, purification, conse-cration of communal spirits, and reification of enemies. Thus, the analysis of Joan Sales’s Incerta glòria illustrates the mechanisms of victimhood and scape-goating. The chapter on Juan Goytisolo argues that Conde Don Julian’s relevant profanation of Spain’s tribal idols nevertheless collapses with the imposition of a new “structural authority” embodied in the illusion of an independent, self-validating subject (88). Viestenz’s chapter on Juan Benet and Mercé Rodoreda examines these authors’ techniques of creating communities tied together by ritual sacrifice and locked in fictional settings where time eternally repeats itself. The reading of Martı́n Santos’s texts, framed by that writer’s declared intention to destroy “la España sagrada” (117), replacing it with “las Sagradas Escrituras de la mañana” (qtd. 119), ends with Viestenz’s conclusion that “a literature con-ceived as a sacred text denouncing the dogmatism of the regime’s ideology con-comitantly participates in a new conception of the political founded on the collective reception of literature within the intimacy of the home” (144). The final chapter, dedicated to Salvador Espriu, leaves the reader with the poet’s compelling utopian vision of a community bound, not by violence or exclusion, but rather by the common task of constructing a new temple of fraternal love. Viestenz is at his best conducting strong, erudite close readings, and his atten-tion to the deep structures operating independently of the authors’ intentions or explicit religious references reaps productive readings of those texts that are well known and demonstrates the relevance of the ones that are under-researched. As with most books of close readings, what is mostly satisfying here is the experience of following the author on the exhilarating journey of his tour de force analyses. Some of these, however, are so deeply immersed in theory that the reader may find the book’s intention—to help her understand the political imagination of Franco’s times and the role that literature played in articulating, problematizing, or countering its sacred core—lost in the mystical woods, where primary and secondary sources echo each other in disregard for chronology, for example when the author tells us that “Adolfo Muñoz Alonso, Franco’s director general de la prensa” in 1961 “strongly echoes Agamben’s theoretization” from 1995 Homo Sacer (72), and Martı́n Santos, in his 1961 Tiempo de silencio, “echoes Foucault’s thought” from 1975 Discipline and Punish (140). Still, it is precisely the book’s interpretative power that leaves the reader wishing to know whether, following Viestenz’s take on the Franco-time political imagination, one can catch a glimpse of any sacred nationalism beyond the “play” of archaic signifiers and glean some insight into institutional or cultural practices that brought the sacred or re-sacralized Spanishness into the main-stream. Glossing on Jacques Rancière, Viestenz rightly asserts that “political imag-ination is impossible without such things as discourse and the visual and plastic arts” (180). So how did the literary images of ritual violence analyzed here relate to the attempts at releasing violence into the public sphere, championed by the French and Iberian surrealists in the 1930s? Or how did fraternal visions of Espriu, for example, relate to the evolving strands of Catalanism? Or, coming PAGE 130................. 19295$ REVS 04-19-19 11:40:41 PS130  Revista Hispánica Moderna 72.1 (2019) closer to our times, how did the de- and re-sacralizing texts of Goytisolo, Martı́n-Santos, or Benet relate to the all-too-visual consecration of Spain’s national unity through a collective performance of touristifed rites, implemented by Carl Schmitt’s notorious follower in the Spanish government—Manuel Fraga Iri-barne? Though Viestenz’s work does not tackle these questions, there is other research available to help satisfy a reader once her curiosity has been stirred up. For example, Robin Adèle Greeley’s Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (2006), which looks at both sides of the French-Catalan border to trace the debates con-cerning ritual and political violence, and Justin Crumbaugh’s Destination Dictator-ship (2009), a book that cross-references Fraga’s political imagination with the practices that this imagination inspired, are good companions to Viestenz’s thoughts on the many sacred communities conjured by Iberian writers. The reader interested in these subjects will also find useful The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain Beyond the Secular City (edited by Antonio Cordoba and Daniel Garcı́a-Donoso), published after Viestenz’s book. As Viestenz rightly argues, secularization has always been a moving target in Spain. Following the nineteenth-century fragmentation of religious discourses and practices that took on the guise of laicization, the idea of Spain’s nationhood as a sacred unity and a transcendental destiny survived in a variety of forms and shapes, ranging from the enshrined state apparatus imagined by neo-Catholics, to the anarchist visions of “divine violence,” to the dreams of a holy tourism. As Europe’s governments continue to look for ways to strengthen the borders and enforce Europe’s still one-sided laicization laws, Viestenz’s incisive and timely book empowers its readers to go beyond the ideas of official secularism or religi-osity and tackle dangerous questions about the archaic structures of thought hovering over modern nationalisms and communicated through culture. EUGENIA AFINOGUENOV´ A, Marquette University 

Review of \u3cem\u3eBy the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination\u3c/em\u3e by William Viestenz

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&amp;context=span_fac

Review of \u3cem\u3eBy the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination\u3c/em\u3e by William Viestenz

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