Ambiguity
and Historical Interpretation in Javier Cercas’
Soldados de Salamina
The thirty four
editions, all of
which appeared in three years, the translations into several languages
and the
screen adaptation by the Spanish film director David Trueba, speak for
themselves about the publishing success that Soldiers of
Salamis (1) had in
Generally, the memories which are most likely to be remembered by the community are both the heroic and the tragic ones; those that conjure fundamental myths of countries […], and those that mark a severe rupture of the national identity (e.g. the civil wars). [My translation] (356)
The novel tells the
true story of
Rafael Sánchez Mazas’ almost execution. Sánchez Mazas is
a
fascist writer and founder, together with José Antonio Primo de
Rivera,
of Falange Española. (3) Javier Cercas,
a young journalist, discovers
by chance Sánchez Mazas’ story and decides to reconstruct it.
Seeking
exile, the Spanish loyalist troops are heading for
The novel is structured
in three
chapters. The first one focuses on the search for pieces of information
and
documents that the narrator Cercas has to carry out to reconstruct
Sánchez Mazas’ story. The second one, on the other hand,
represents both the reconstruction of the events the fascist writer
went
through, and the book which he had promised to the deserters and
farmers who
had helped him survive. In this book within a book Sánchez Mazas
should
have supposedly told everything that happened during those days. Yet,
he never
wrote the book during his real life. And the third chapter deals with
the story
of Miralles, the militiaman who lets Sánchez Mazas go. Miralles
is an
eighty year old man now and the narrator Cercas finds him in an asylum
close to
the city of
The interpretation the
author
Javier Cercas gives to the recent history of
The first discursive ethic code, as opposed to the “franquista” official discourse, is employed to characterize the 1931-1936 Republic established as a “legitimate political system”. When the narrator Cercas talks about Sánchez Mazas’ progressively renouncing the public sphere, he asserts about the latter: “And, moreover, of course, he didn’t regret having contributed with all his forces to the start of a war against a legitimate Republic” [My translation] (134). The quote can seem anecdotic, but it is not, if we remember the process of enculturation that the “Franquismo” put to work during forty years. (5) Part of this enculturation consisted in the spreading of the belief that the loyalist army of the Republic was actually a rebel army which was also called the “red hordes”. According to “Franquismo” enculturation, the “National Army”, that is the fascist army, made war in order to reestablish a fictitious preexistent political order. (6)
Secondly, after two
thirds of the novel,
the author exchanges Sánchez Mazas for a new hero: the
Republican
militiaman Miralles. The two characters share the forgetfulness of the
History. For Gómez
López-Quiñones that paradox is the very vertebral column
of the
narration (120). Referring to Sánchez Mazas, the narrator Cercas
repeats
several times, throughout the novel, Andrés Trapiello’s
assertion
about fascist writers: “They won the war, but they lost the History of
Literature” [My translation] (22). (7) As far
as Miralles is
concerned, he represents the forgetfulness of the democratic society
concerning
those who fought for freedom in the Civil War:
-Shut
up and listen to me, young man -he said-. Answer me! Do you think that
anyone
thanked me? I will tell you: nobody. Nobody ever thanked me for
spending my
youth fighting for your shitty country. Nobody. Not even a single word.
Not a
gesture, not a letter. Nothing. (175)
This change towards a
more “politically
correct” tone may have been caused by a publicity interest. Another,
more
complex interpretation is related to the fact that, on many occasions,
in the
novel, the narrator talks about his father’s death. We know that this
death is one of the causes by which the narrator Cercas became really
depressed
right before the beginning of the plot. But, although
we know this loss affects the narrator profoundly, he does not
give us any information about his father. The narrator Cercas states in
the end
of the book: “Then, I thought it was not me who remembered my father,
but
it was him who was holding on to my memory, so as not to die entirely”
[My translation] (187). Nevertheless, this absence in the novel leads
us to
conceive problematic relations between the narrator Cercas and his
father. At two
different points in the novel, we can notice how the narrator Cercas is
trying
to find a father in Miralles. First, when he correlates his father’s
age
to Miralles’ age: “I thought Miralles has the same age as my father
would have if he was alive” [My translation] (187). Second, in the last
pages of the book, when the narrator Cercas is returning to Spain after
his
meeting with Miralles, he fantasizes about creating some sort of family
with
Miralles, Conchi (the narrator Cercas’ extravagant girlfriend), Roberto
Bolaños (the friend who gave him the one last clue to find
Miralles),
and Bolaños’ wife: “and we would form an odd or impossible
family, and then Miralles definitely would stop being an orphan (and
maybe so
would I) and Conchi would feel the terrible nostalgia of having a baby
(and
maybe so would I)” [My translation] (206). (8)
Author
Javier Cercas’ real family was “falangista”. In
the above mentioned examples, we can notice a kind of “killing the
(“falangista”) father” complex. In any case, the real Cercas
feels a cultural guilt assuming somewhat the responsibility for the
beginning
of the war. This phenomenon is represented in the novel in the need the
narrator feels to appropriate the republican identity and to look for a
paternal relation with Miralles. (9)
With the
second discursive ethic code, Cercas puts in question the
interpretative ethic values of democracy. The representation of this
code in
the narration can be summarized in Herzberges’ definition of the
historic
novel of the present time:
According
to Herzberges’ definition, Cercas’s novel is a
dissident narration, standing not only against the dictatorship moral
code, but
also against the democratic one. We can see this point in the way that
Cercas
presents the historic character of Sánchez Mazas. A good part of
the
novel is about the vindication of this fascist writer. His work was
progressively forgotten; it was ignored even during the
“franquista” period. It was interpreted from a political point of
view during the “Transición” when the left dominated
literary criticism. The narrator’s counter cultural point of view
stands
out when he asserts that Sánchez Mazas’ real interest in fascism
was purely esthetical: “Some naïf people like the guardians of the
leftist orthodoxy […] denounce that to vindicate a
“falangista” writer was to vindicate […]
“falangismo” [My translation] (22).
Thus,
Cercas tries to separate the judgment of the literary work from the
moral judgment. He tries to vindicate the literary figure he considers
to be a
good writer and, at the same time, the man who carries the main
ideological responsibility
for the Spanish Civil War. The narrator Cercas underlines at one point
in the
novel:
Cercas’s
explanation in brackets is significant and appears
repeatedly throughout the book in relation with the value judgments
concerning
Sánchez Mazas. These explanations point out the uncertainty of
the
author when it comes to giving an opinion about the writer.
Moreover,
the narrator presents Sánchez Mazas as an aristocratic
and decadent poet. For example, the narrator excuses the violence of
Falange
Española by stating that violence was not typical of the
founders of
Falange. He describes them as a group of writers who were simply
concerned with
beauty and the sublime. From his point of view, violence had been
unavoidably inherited
from the past: “Violence came from before and despite of the
victimizing
protests of some leaders of the party who were refractory to it because
of their
temperament and their formation” [My translation] (87-8).
Cercas
seems even to exonerate Sánchez Mazas from any
responsibility and he puts in question the importance of the latter’s
role in the outbreak of the Civil War. The narrator represents
Sánchez
Mazas as a poet who dreamed of the reconstruction of a mythical past.
For
Cercas the writer’s interest in fascism was purely esthetic:
Or,
in other words: maybe, for Sánchez Mazas, fascism was merely the
political intention of bringing to life
his poetry, of creating the world he melancholically conjured up in his
poetry
– the abolished, invented and impossible world of Paradise. [My
translation] (82). (10)
Finally,
the narrator presents Sánchez Mazas as a product of his
time, as a subject without agency, and determined by the historic
circumstances
in which he happened to live. We discussed this point earlier on, when
talking
about how the narrator describes violence as inherited from the past.
At
another point in the novel, for example, the narrator says that
Sánchez
Mazas’ belonging to the fascist party was a circumstantial consequence
of
his travel to Italy as a reporter of the newspaper ABC:
“No matter, it
is true that he enthusiastically welcomed the March towards Rome […]
and
that he saw in Benito Mussolini the reincarnation of the renaissance
condotieros”
[My translation] (82).
Following that, the
narrator makes
a distinction between the idearium
and history of Falange Española and the idearium
and history of the “Franquismo” and defines
them as opposite. He contrasts the two historical figures José
Antonio
Primo de Rivera and general Francisco Franco Bahamonte. During the
first twenty
years of democracy in
[…] the ideas and lifestyle, […] were, in time, converted to the lifestyle and ideas that had been initially adopted as revolutionary, avantgarde ideology because of the urgency of the war. These ideas were turned into an ornamental ideology by the fat, womanish, incompetent, astute and conservative military man who thus usurped them. These ideas and lifestyle were finally converted in the, more and more rotten and deprived of significance, paraphernalia against which a group of loons fought for forty years seeking to justify their shitty regime. [My translation] (86)
The quote is long, but highly significant. In this text, and generally throughout the novel, Falange Española is presented as a group of idealist writers, circumstantially involved in politics. According to Cercas, the “franquista” apparatus used them for evil purposes.
Third of all, the novel displays a positive perspective on fascism which, as opposed to the faulty democratic liberalism, is presented as a newly created historical product. Curiously enough, Cercas finds that fascism and communism share a characteristic which sets them both apart from liberalism: “César Arconada […] summarized the feeling a lot of people of his age shared when he declared that “a young man can be a communist, a fascist, anything but he cannot have any liberal ideas”. [My translation] (84)
Cercas does not choose
this quote randomly.
César Arconada was a communist writer exiled in the
The third ethic code in
the novel
is the code of the “franquista” enculturation. Throughout forty
years, the “franquista” apparatus created all mechanisms of thought control which, according to
Marvin Harris, a modern state can put to work: public spectacles, mass
media and
universal education (217-8). In Soldados
de Salamina the elements of the “franquista” code look very
diffuse if this code is not carefully delimited. The “Franquismo”
had two discourses regarding the Civil War: the first one was public
and
official, the second one was private. (13) I am not
going to describe the first
one because it is the most well known and, in my opinion, it cannot be
employed
to interpret this novel. By contrast, the latter is present throughout
the
text. Inevitably, the Spanish “franquista” society developed a feeling
of guilt for the outbreak of the Civil War. The latter was supposed to
be a military
intervention, similar to the XIXth century Spanish military tradition
which aimed
at taking the power transitorily without creating a long term state
structure. Nevertheless,
it failed and provoked one of the most shockingly fratricidal wars in
the
history of humanity. Unlike the victorious public discourse, the
unofficial discourse
described the Civil War as a war of “brothers against brothers”.
Remorse
leads the victorious party to appropriate a discourse according to
which, they
could both share responsibility with the defeated and create the
fiction that
it was an inevitable conflict. Thus, the discourse of the winning side
borrowed
the myth of Castille as a cainitic land and applied it to the entire
This discourse can be noticed at different points in Soldados de Salamina. Indeed, Cercas actually employs the adjective “cainita” in the text. When describing the literary activity of Rafael Sánchez Mazas, the narrator says: “a main goal […] was basically to save all possible quotes […] that could be used to justify the cainitic war which was to come” [My translation] (85).
The novel emphasizes
some instances
of brotherly communion between republicans and nationals both prior to
and
following the war. For example, the narrator describes the meetings of
the
leaders of the still in embryo Falange in the basement of the
Café
Lyón in
They argued strongly, until late at night, about politics and literature, and they met, in an unlikely atmosphere of cordiality, young leftist writers with whom they shared ideas and beers and conversations and jokes and cordial insults. [My translation] (87)
The text goes on to
talk about the breakdown
of this brotherly cordiality between fascist and leftist writers
because of the
beginning of the Civil War. The Civil War and the dissolution it
brought about were
both unrelated to them and inevitable:
The beginning of
the war turned
the devoted and elusive hostility into a real hostility, although
the inevitable damage of public life
during the 30’s already announced, to whoever wanted to see it, the
imminence of the change. [My translation] (87)
A
similar moment of brotherhood, now during the war, occurs in Collell
Abbey
where Sánchez Mazas is a prisoner before his planned execution.
During
one of the walks which the prisoners are allowed by the guardians, one
of the
militiamen -the one who is later going to save the writer’s life and
who
will be known as Miralles- starts singing the pasodoble Suspiros
de España and dances with his gun as he would with a
woman. This leads to a moment of comradeship between prisoners and
guardians. In
Sánchez Mazas own words:
Before
finish dancing the song, somebody said his name and insulted him mildly
and, in that moment, it was as if the spell had broken; many started to
laugh
or smile, we started to laugh, prisoners and guardians, all of us. I
think that
was the first time I had laughed in a long time. [My translation] (122)
With reference to this
camaraderie,
Cercas establishes a connection between Sánchez Mazas and
republican
writers and politicians. In the novel, the narrator tells us how the
writer Sánchez
Mazas had bought a house together with José Bergamín
before the
war. The fact that Bergamín was communist is emphasized in the
text (133).
We also find out that Sánchez Mazas had asked Franco to change
the death
penalty of the poet Miguel Hernández into life prison. The
latter was dying
in the prison of
Nevertheless, the most
interesting
element of the cainitic discourse of the Civil War in the text is
Cercas’
article which he publishes in the provincial newspaper where he works.
The
article has as topic the sixtieth anniversary of Antonio Machado’s
death
during his exile in
The July18th
state
strike caught Manuel in
This text represents the cainitic myth of the Spanish Civil War - two brothers separated by destiny find themselves in two antagonist sides of a war they have nothing to do with.
This narrative
structure applies in
this same article to Sánchez Mazas´ story. Cercas employs
the same
ethic judgment to connect Antonio Machado’s death to Sánchez
Mazas’
execution. At the time, the former
was already in exile on the French side of the border while the latter
was a
prisoner of the republican militia, on the Spanish side of the border.
Cercas
emphasizes the similarities of the two stories:
I imagined then, that the symmetry and contrast between these two terrible stories –close to being a chiasm of History- may have not been casual and that, if I could be able to tell everything in the same article, this strange parallelism could give the events a new significance. (23)
This last assertion is
somewhat naïf,
since it is an interpretative pattern of history, which, as we saw,
belongs to
the “franquismo”. Talking about the
Spanish postmodern
novel, Jo Labanyi states in the book Myth
and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel:
The aim continues to be that of “desmythification”, with the important difference that novelists now show an awareness of the fact that language inevitably mysthifies reality and that the writer approximates to reality not by “describing it as it is”, but by exposing the falsifications perpetrated by language –that of others and the writer’s own. (52)
Soldiers
of Salamis is, therefore, an explicit questioning of language as a
“mythificator”
of the past, which uses preexistent myths to narrate the past, and of
the
authenticity of both the historic discourse and the collective memoir.
The
entire novel is based on the idea that the text is not actually a
novel, but a “real”
narration. It centers on the story of the real life writer and
journalist Javier
Cercas, the real execution story of the real life Rafael Sánchez
Mazas
and, what the novel wants us to believe is the “real” story of
Miralles,
the militiaman that let him escape. Only the execution of Rafael
Sánchez
Mazas happened entirely as presented in the novel. The character
Miralles and
his story are entirely fictional. The story of the real life writer and
journalist Javier Cercas’ is a mixture of reality and fiction. (15) In my
opinion, Soldiers of Salamis is an
example of Labanyi’s idea that, for the last thirty years, language has
not been employed in the Spanish historical novel to describe reality.
On the
contrary, it has been trying to call our attention to the paradoxes and
ambiguities occurring when events are represented in language. The
narrator
Cercas talks about this issue throughout the novel, for example when he
states
regarding his sources of information: “I asked myself whether these
narrations were in agreement with the truth or if, maybe inevitably,
they were painted
with varnish by this mass of half truths and lies.” (62) Soldiers
of
Published in 2001, Soldiers of Salamis is a product of the particular
social and cultural context that created the memoirist interpretation
of the
recent past in Spanish society. All of this is, of course, related to
the Civil
War and “Franquismo”. The experience of the Civil War and its dark
end in the “Franquismo” were so traumatic for the Spanish society
that the process of reformulation could not be concluded in these past
thirty
years. According to Gómez López-Quiñones:
The Spanish Civil War is still a historic, symbolic and textual space, very dynamic, open and conflicting whose ending or conclusion seems unlikely. The Spanish Civil War can and must still rewrite vindictively because, for many reasons, the democratic transition did not bring about a historiographic and literary discourse for the majority, one that is solid and radical enough to redeem all the excesses and manipulations done for the “Franquista” regime. [My translation] (123)
Following the “forgetfulness” pact during the Spanish
Transition to democracy, from the middle 90’s, the Spanish society
started to slowly leave the voluntary amnesia. (16)
From that moment on,
Cercas’
ambiguous interpretation of the fascist and dictatorial
past of
Working through involves repetition with significant difference
–difference that may be desirable when compared with compulsive
repetition. In any event, working through is not a linear,
teleological, or
straightforward developmental (or stereotypically dialectical) process
either
for the individual or for the collectivity. It requires going back to
problems,
working them over, and perhaps transforming the understanding of them.
(148)
The Spanish historic memoir is “working through” in a reformulating process with a diffuse aim. We can view this aim as an ambiguous interpretative space mediating two opposing points of view: the “mesetarian” guilt driven point of view and the “periferal” victimization point of view. They both share only democratic values and give birth to very different interpretations of History. Soldiers of Salamis, as an example of the “mesetarian” point of view, represents the paradox of having different ethic codes to interpret History.
Notes
(1) This novel was translated
into English by Anne
McLean in 2003 with the title Soldiers of
Salamis.
(2) The source of this piece
of information is the web
page of Tusquets Publishers and the web page of the film directed by
David
Trueba and produced by Vicente Andrés Gómez.
(3) Falange Española
was the Spanish fascist
party, ideologically homologous to the Italian Partito Nazionale
Fascista of
Benito Musolini. Falange supplied Franquismo with a politic structure.
We can
define Franquismo as the dictatorial regime instituted after the
Spanish Civil
War by the traditionalist general Francisco Franco Bahamonte. It lasted
forty
years. The source of this piece of information is Javier Tusell´s
monograph La dictarura de Franco.
This book is an excellent classic study on the nature and evolution of
general
Franco’s regime, and its relation with the fascist ideology.
(4) I am mentioning two
Javier Cércas-s in this
work: the writer of the book, and the protagonist of the book who is
writing a
book of his own. The meta-narration can make my exegesis confusing. I
will
refer to the first one as the author Cercas, and to the second one as
the
narrator Cercas.
(5) Marvin Harris defines
“enculturation”
as “a partly conscious and partly unconscious learning experience
whereby
the older generation invites, induces, and compels the younger
generation to
adopt traditional ways of thinking and behaving” (7). During forty
years
general Franco’s dictatorship imposed an entire reading of history and
a
new moral code which penetrated society, especially the future
generations
during the war, in many different ways. I will refer again to this
process in
the analysis of the third discursive ethic code of Soldados
de Salamina.
(6) We can find a very
concrete example of this in the
“franquista” legislation. The political system of the
“Franquismo” based its legal apparatus on the “Leyes
Fundamentales”. War prisoners and exiled people were judged for the delinquency of having rebelled against the
state and the laws of the Dictatorship that had been established after
the war!!!
(7) Cercas takes this
sentence from Trapiello´s book Las
armas y las letras. Literatura y Guerra Civil (1936-1939).
(8) Roberto Bolaños is
another character taken
from real life. Roberto Bolaños (1953-2003) is a very well known
Chilean
writer. Some of his more popular books are Los
detectives salvajes, El gaucho
insufrible and 2666, the novel he
left unconcluded upon his death. Bolaños lived several times
throught
his life in
(9) Another element that
supports this idea is the
fact that the novel has two heroes: Sánchez Mazas and Miralles.
Cercas
would have chosen the “falangista” writer, but he finally chose the
old republican ex-militiaman.
(11) After the Spanish Civil
War, all the parties and
politic associations that were not forbidden were grouped by Franco in
one
unique party with a strong bureaucratic character. According with
Javier
Tusell, the “franquismo” differs from fascism in its Italian
version, since the former did not have as purpose a revolution of the
values
and the creation of a moral and political new man. The “franquismo”
had as target the political demobilization of the Spanish society. The
main
groups or political families that formed the Movimiento Nacional were:
the
fascists of Falange Española, the “carlistas”, the
monarchists and the ultraconservatives or traditionalists.
(12) It is interesting to
notice the place of
Sánchez Mazas and Arconada in the Manual
de Literatura Española edited by Felipe Pedraza. Both of
them have a
very small rubric. The former appears in the chapter titled “Writers of
the 50’s: Outside the Dominant Tendencies” and the sub rubric
“Esthetic Writers”. The latter appears in the chapter “Writer
of the Period of the Avangarde” and the sub rubric “Social
Realism”.
(13) I am extrapolating this
idea from the book Así se hizo la Transición
by Victoria Prego. This journalist gathers in this book materials she
had
collected as research for the preparation of the homonymous TV series.
The book
is, generally, superficial in its historic analysis and it often
appears to be
simply anecdotic, but it is an infinite source of first hand
testimonial pieces
of information. One such piece of information is the double discourse,
both
political and private, of the “franquista” politicians.
(14) The myth of Castille as
“Cain’s
land” is a discourse that appears repeatedly in the entire cultural
production of Castille. The first text where we can see this mythical
structure
is probably the Primera Crónica
General de España or Estoria
de España written by the king Alfonso X el Sabio in the
XIIIth
century. This chronicle tells the story of Fernando I, the very first
king of
Castille, and of his access to power following his killing of his
brother, don
García (484-6).
The most recent, and the most well known,
example
before the Civil War is the chapter “La tierra de Alvar
González” comprising ballads by Antonio Machado in his book Campos de Castilla, edited in 1912.
These are narrative ballads written in the traditional form of
“romance”. They tell the story of Alvar González’s
killing by his sons. The latter wanted to come into possession of the
money
which was left to them through inheritance (517-41). We have to
remember that
Antonio Machado and all the members of the Generación del 98
wanted to
regenerate
(15) Cercas explains this
mixture of reality and
fiction as a reaction against those who claim that the novel is dead.
In an
interview for ClubCultura.com, Cercas assertes: “it is an argument
against the people that claim that the novel is dead, because the novel
is the
most malleable genre. […] I have mixed reality and fiction, but it is
possible to make this and thousands of other things”.
(16) Throughout the novel,
this pact of forgetfulness
that facilitated the Transition to Democracy is alluded to many times
in a contemptuous manner. For
example, when the novel is just about to finish, Miralles says to the
narrator
Cercas:
-Shut up and listen to me,
young man -he said-. Answer me! Do you think that anyone has ever
thanked me? I
will answer: nobody. Nobody has ever thanked me for spending my youth
fighting
for your shitty country. Nobody. Not even a single word. Not a gesture,
not a
letter.
“Out of all stories of
History”, I thought while Miralles was talking, “the History of
Spain is the saddest one, because it always finishes in a bad way.”
Then,
I thought: “Does it always finish
in a bad way?.” I thought: The Transition was a big
bullshit!” (175)
(17) It is possible to
culturally distinguish between
two kinds of Spaniards: “mesetarios” and
“periféricos”. The first ones belong culturally to the two
extended valleys in the centre of the
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---.
Soldiers of Salami. Trans. Anne Mclean.
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