The political novel that spawned the 15M

The political novel that spawned the 15M

The political novel that spawned the 15M

Nacho Vegas called it "a crowd cracking." For David Becerra Mayor it is defined as "listening to the noise of the friction of contradictions".

Becerra Mayor has been working for a long time on the relationship between literature and ideology. The usual way to think about it is to analyze the influence that a text has on readers and answer the question of whether or not that book is a good companion for the politicization process of the reader. In After the event (Bellaterra Edicions), Becerra thinks about it the other way around: he analyzes how the text operates in "ideological reproduction." According to the theory of the "ideological unconscious" and the "radical historicity of literature" by Juan Carlos Rodríguez, both the author, his readers, and his critics share the same conflicts and contradictions in the unconscious: ideology is neither chosen nor it is built from above. Ideology is shaped, rather, by the social and production relations that occur at a given historical moment. This current historical moment happens, according to the author, under the influence of 15M, which he marks as "the event", following the terminology of the philosopher Alain Badiou.

Of course there was a political novel before 15M, but "the event" is inserted in 2011 and produces a change when its activist phase ends and it becomes a more reflective one. "When you ask me if the literature that emerges after the event finds new readers or if these are the same ones that were already politicized before the event, I would tell you that the readers of these novels are neither new nor are they exactly the same, they are readers Others, in the same way that these texts that emerge from the event are not simply new texts, but other texts, configured by a new ideological unconscious in which cracks or fissures have opened through which another way can be announced and enunciated. to understand the world ". What escapes through these cracks is the possibility of interpreting what happens to post-15M Spanish society not as isolated individuals but collectively: "Through that crack it is possible to read the return of politics in Spanish literature of the last decade, in the same way that society as a whole experienced this return ". It is appropriate to remember that the slogans that made the 15M walk were conjugated in the plural: "they do not represent us", "youth without a future", "we are not anti-system, the system is anti-us", "our dreams do not fit in your ballot boxes".

In a previous essay, this professor of Spanish Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid coined a revulsive look at the hegemonic literature of the last decades in La novela de la no-ideología (Tierradenadie, 2013): "It is a literature that is characterized by the absence of political or social conflict, "he explains. "In these novels it is assumed that the time of ideologies has passed, but of course the novel of non-ideology has ideology, what happens is that, as Althusser said, ideology never says 'I am ideological'". What allows 15M is the emergence of a literature "where the political does not move but rather constitutes the base on which the conflict that the novel portrays is raised".

The dominant Spanish novel, which is the most widely read, the one that wins awards and receives the approval of critics, —Almudena Grandes, Javier Cercas, Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Juan José Millás, Luis Landero, Ray Loriga, etc.— tends to displace the conflict and find the cause of it within the person: their personal or family experiences, the place or position in which they lived, the crossroads where chance placed the protagonist. On the other hand, it does not explore that the reasons for the conflicts - these could be precariousness, discrimination or wealth - are collective. The 15M introduces the "we" and turns this narrative upside down. It is not that 15M produces revolutionary novels, as Becerra warns in his book, but by being able to name the contradiction, instead of fleeing from it, it generates a return to politics.

For him, the "starting gun" was given by the book coordinated by Guillem Martínez entitled CT or the Culture of the Transition (2012), which mirrors the cultural fabric woven from the 78 regime. "We slept, we woke up", one could say about the appearance of the CT concept to explain the hegemonic intelligentsia, alluding to another fifteen-Mayista motto. The shock caused by the attempted censorship of the publication of El cura y los mandarins by journalist Gregorio Morán in 2014 is part of the same state of alert.

Becerra, who is more interested in "listening to the works" than the authors, points out throughout his book which publications respond in that other way. It alludes to Rafael Chirbes, Belén Gopegui, Marta Sanz, Isaac Rosa or Rafael Reig, who manage to gain a niche not in circuits with difficult access or minimal editions, but in spaces with scope. Critical citizenship is organized in Unauthorized Access (2011) by Gopegui. Fernando Díaz, who is assumed to be a pseudonym, faces his own literary validation in Pamphlet to continue living (2014). Elvira Navarro makes the novel of the crisis and explains how mental illness is a consequence of precariousness with her La Trabara (2014). Marta Sanz puts the body at the center of the effects of capitalism with Clavicle (2017). Javier Mestre addresses the underground economy and the relocation of the footwear industry in Made in Spain (2014). Edurne Portela addresses violence in Euskadi, without narratological traps, in Better Absence (2017). And so, jumping from one book to another, the author defines how the end of the middle class has been told, for those who have wanted to hear it.

"Will these novels of the return of politics be able to hegemonize the field or will the novels of non-ideology re-impose themselves?" David Becerra Mayor wonders in the course of this interview. "Will the contradictions continue to tighten and the crack will continue to widen and, therefore, the political will continue to occupy a central place in the literary field, configuring structures of feeling in which new practices and social and life experiences are announced, the emergence of another world, or, on the contrary, the organic intellectuals of advanced capitalism in Spain, of the regime of 78, will regain positions, which they have not lost either, even though they are proclaimed canceled, and will once again despise this kind of literature? " The answer is: "We will see, it is still too early to draw conclusions."

It is a battle that Becerra does not consider to be fought in the strictly literary field. "If we are living a new defeat, all this literature will soon fall into oblivion, or rather it will lose its legibility conditions, as happened to the political, social and even revolutionary novels of the 30s and 50s. And in effect they will become illegible: they will be left without the framework that gives them meaning. "

It is not the first time that Spain goes through an "event" whose shock wave stirs up literature. They were different contexts but capitalist society was also faced with its contradictions. "In the 30s, revolutionary, proletarian, social narratives emerged, a new type of novel called documentary. In the 50s, the new process of capitalist accumulation that in Spain was called 'economic developmentalism' creates new social conflicts, Spanish social realism arises which is in charge of telling from another place, from the exploitation, how that economic takeoff, which the official account attributes to the technocrats and to a very specific type of economic policy, was actually possible because of the precarious, insecure and insane work they suffered who built power plants or extracted minerals from the mines. " What they do have in common is that these experiences "were despised by the literary institution, which is that room, or set of rooms, which ultimately determine what can be considered literature or not. They were, I say, despised until they fell, in many cases, in oblivion ".

After 15M, in 2013, David Becerra worked on an edition of the novel La mina by Armando Salinas, originally published in 1960 after being a finalist for the Nadal Prize the previous year. It is a book that had stopped being read. "When I started working on La mina, and comparing the different editions that had existed, I realized something that was undoubtedly anecdotal, but deep down it seemed very significant. Before my edition, the last time La mina was published I had published in Spain, it was in July 1984, the month and year I was born. It was as if my generation arrived at the moment when that literature was giving its last, and already very timid and inoffensive, blow its tail. 30 years later The mine existed again in a politically very interesting context. I was not aware that its editing was possible for the political moment, but it surely had a lot to do with it. Perhaps, in a different context, no publisher would have been interested in republishing a forgotten author and a novel that the critics were in charge of calling bad literature ".

What he was aware of at the time, in 2016, was that the reissue by Hoja de Lata —editorial in which Becerra directs the essay collection— of Tea rooms by Luisa Carnés, a 1934 novel that had not returned to be published, it meant that something was moving. "It had an excellent reception by readers and critics. There I really noticed that the 15M had transformed the cultural public sphere and that suddenly it was possible to recover the readability conditions that made unreadable certain literary texts forgotten by the institution of literature." Next March, the stage director Laia Ripoll will take to the stage an adaptation of Tea rooms.

After the event it is not a book that has come from a spectator. It is an artifact that wants to intervene in combat. Invite, as Becerra does, to listen to the crash. It proposes, as has been said before, reading text instead of pointing out authors. The notion of author, says the essayist, is "an illusion inscribed in literary ideology." It works "as a brand in the literary market", but also "as a special and privileged being who believes that he controls the meaning of his text." And Becerra Mayor does not believe that the meaning of the literary text is controllable because it is always "an incomplete, incoherent, contradictory, conflictive work." The novel that returns to the political remains, after all, a novel that is sold in bookstores, a novel that is presented in formal events, a novel that is bought and sold and is reviewed in the press. It is rare to find a challenge to the very concept of authorship, although attempts have been made. "The Kamchatka magazine, from the University of Valencia, directed by Jaume Peris, published a monograph in 2017 on collective creation and non-authorship, and they studied some interesting cases, of which I would highlight the work of the novelist Eva Fernández who, In a very Benjaminian way, she decided to be more a producer than an author, taking a step aside to let the workers tell their story, when she published the collective book We Are Coca-Cola in Struggle in La Oveja Roja. novel Pamphlet to continue living, a novel written by someone who precisely decides that he does not want to be an author because assuming this category, or illusion of literary ideology, would end up neutralizing the political potential that his novel may have ".

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