Goldstein
Banned
ONEIRONAUT
Literary gazette of epic sorcery and science fiction
Vol. LIV. July-December 1993.
Editorial Akasha. Barcelona.
The war that never was: a parahistorical antology.
By Xavier Pons.
“On this day, the last remnants of the Fascist conspiracy against Spain have surrendered to the forces loyal to the Republic. The war is over."
-Juan Negrín, communique of may 18th, 1939.
Our most veteran readers might remind that, even a decade ago, Parahistory was unknown beyond the more specialized binnacles and literary atheneums. However, nowadays a great number of baseline writers, either in Europe or in the Anglo World, dare to play with the course of our historical events, awakening the curiosity and the imagination of thousands of amateur and laypeople around the world. This bears a certain risk when it comes to measuring the factual importance of Parahistory, for it can persuade us of two wrong notions: that we’re dealing with a relatively new concept, and that Spain hasn’t had notable examples until recently.
Regarding the former, it should be noted that it’s actually as old a genre as humanity. The first recorded parahistorical reflection, AB URBE CONDITA, already raised in Roman times the possible effects of a direct confrontation between the Greece of Alexander the Great and a fledgling Rome. After the Enlightenment, and as the permutations of history were becoming frantic, we did not lack did new examples. However, we can be sure that they were not the pioneers of Parahistory because this genre responds to a primal instinct. All we humans often take decisions we regret or that, on the contrary, produce a chilling premonition of the evil we have avoided. It is then, only then, when we felt the dent left by our choices in the world, when we ask: What if I had not missed that train? What if I had said I what I didn’t have the courage to say? What if I had answered that call?
Parahistory is just that: it is the product of everyday human drama, only at a superior structural scale, a scale that envelops everything. Is it not true that we have the world we deserve? Not for nothing, we have made it.
In Spain, the wanderings of parahistorical literature began in the late nineteenth century, with FOUR CENTURIES OF GOOD GOVERNANCE, in which a dynastic alteration within the Trastamara saves Spain of its imperial decline. Its nostalgic and denouncing value is no wonder, as this is one of the original motivations of the genre, and obviously the years around the disaster of '98 were deeply traumatic for those who lived it. In fact, the heppenings that have marked the collective consciousness of a country can be easily traced, as they end up being the largest source of parahistorical tales. Thus, a fascist victory in World War II is often a capital and recurrent theme throughout the world, one of the first to be raised by the profane. We have outstanding examples as HOMELAND, well known for the amateur. US reflections often turn around its Civil War (from the pioneering GONE WITH THE TIMES, to the most recent and award-winning THE GUNS OF TENNESEE), and as might be expected, in Spain it’s our own Civil War the first one willing to be rewritten, with motivations akin to those of the aforementioned examples: Is morbid and gloomy side of Parahistory.
The recent publication of THE SHADOW OF THE EAGLE in Ediciones Transversales, winner of the 1992 Unamuno Prize, offers perhaps the best time to take out of the trunk of the most notable examples of the totem example of our own Parahistory, one that still opens old wounds in our society: I'm talking, of course, about the hypothetical Sublevated victory in the Spanish Civil War. For its politically sensitive nature, even if they turn around the spectrum of what never happened, these proposals lead us inevitably to follow in the footsteps of the true story that spawned them.
The first example that we know of came in the form of a small propaganda serial in 1943, with the effects of war still present in every corner. THE FACTIOUS WON, signed by a mysterious Juan José López, could hardly be called remarkable if it were not the earliest one, as well as an exceptional involuntary witness to the years of the Depuration. With a poor narrative and an unlikely approach (not even a good indication is given about what made the insurgents win, although it is presumed a greater logistical Axis support), we attend a Madrid where the Inquisition and slavery have been restored, and thousands of defeated Republicans are burnt every night in a gigantic pyre in the Puerta del Sol; Nazi Germany, which has conquered the entire Soviet Union and is ready to invade America and Britain, disposes of Spain as its puppet and particular field of games, and veterans of the Wehrmacht spend their retirement in Madrid and the Mediterranean coast, desecrated households with impunity; Spain has even given the Balearic Islands to Italy as a sign of goodwill, while Falangist Legionnaires struggle for the subjugation of North Africa, up in arms.
We are driven through a rude parade of rapist and sadomasochistic priests, slave-owning bourgeoisie devoured by syphilis, bloodthirsty generals in the most literal sense ... while the vanquished, almost Greek heroes, have an unfortunate tendency to be flayed, forcefully employed in monumental works, or crucified upside down. The argument, almost nonexistent, leads a former UGT trade-unionist across this parade of horrors, until it escapes from the clutches of his landlord master and flees to the Pyrenees, where he finds a Spanish Resistance, a mountain nation of Apollonian heroes like himself, provided by a European network of partisans, from which they plan a counterattack that will bring back freedom to the world.
Let’s recall that, in early 40s, the political life of the Republic was still far from normal. With the constant specter of a German invasion that never came, and the partisan militias still enjoying independence to impose their own form of justice, not only abundant literature of escape bloomed, but also incendiary texts like this we analyzed, showing the purges of the Army, the clergy and the suspected fifth columnists as a necessary evil against the pit of unreason they represented. Let’s take this work for what it is: A reminder of our shady dimension, a fragment come from less pleasant times.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the lack of Allied commitment and the exhausted and impoverished postwar atmosphere, left Spain under a vacuum international status until well into 1945. Famine and uncertainty ran amok. The inability of the radical parties to break entirely with the bourgeois Republic without alienating themselves, with the formalization of the Hispano-Soviet rupture as a catalyst, allowed the emergence and consolidation of the Unified Popular Front. The right-wing felt more decimated and marginalized than ever, and many Popular-Monarchists and Cedistas interpreted the course of the postwar, once the Depuration faded away, as their relegation to an official category of second-class citizens. It was in this context that I, THE KING appeared, a book which sparked a tremendous controversy after its publication in 1951.
Many of our readers would be surprised to know that Miguel Delibes, long before achieving fame with his series of documentaries about the Iberian fauna, gave us this curious parahistorical text, which is an interesting counterpoint to the former, both in background and its undeniable literary quality. In the (albeit politically subverted) edgy line marked by the Albertian current of the 50 and 60, Delibes narrates the last ten years in the life of Juan de Borbón, in a timeline in which he was crowned as John III in 1946. The story draws a Spain under the yoke of General Sanjurjo, who commits a suicidal act by entering the global war on the Axis side and invading Gibraltar. The Allies liberate Spain and, under Anglo-Saxon tutelage, establish a parliamentary monarchy. Here it’s the Left, alongside the Falange, the ones that end up marginalized. Thus, Spain reaches again democracy, the Marshall Plan and external openness, but saving the postwar political violence, the forced neutrality, the anti-clericalism and the official Atheism which Delibes, a staunch Catholic, naturally opposed.
It is unfair that the intellectual life of the time attacked as it did this issue at hand, which the own Max Aub even called "a reactionary and offensive pamphlet." It is true that the work exudes a strong political color that will not escape the reader, and therefore its view of the facts that never occurred is too romantic, too sugary. However, the curious who approaches this work will discover a clever and effective experimental style (the whole text is a monologue, the internal musings of John III in his palace, before bedtime), of an almost surprising quality. One cannot help but imagine what would have made as a writer the good old Miguel, had he chosen a less thorny issue.
In light of the previous two works, it would be a good time to disassemble a certain stereotype about the Civil War: namely, that an insurrect victory would have necessarily dragged Spain into the war alongside the Fascist powers. To which extent is this true? Probably we would have not missed opportunities, as much as we were close to falling into the Allied field on more than one occasion ... but my humble opinion is that this would not be at all guaranteed. The postwar Nationalist Spain would have faced very similar problems to ours, and Hitler (to our knowledge) never showed any real interest in our country. There is nothing that makes us think that a clerical and involucionist Spain could have awakened his sympathy. As in so many cases, however, nothing would have been surprising.
Let's make a small time leap to 1965, year in which this little gem was published, a gem that, like giving reason to the old saying, has been much more lauded outside than inside the country. We are not only before the first Parahistory about the Civil War that aspires to a certain detachment and historical distance (albeit with a rather crazy premise), but before an outstanding example of New Spanish Wave: ENDLESS VICTORY, by the then young Vicente Delgado, was even a candidate for the Nebula Award.
To be fair, the same political climate that enabled this superb novel, contributed to its quick oblivion in Spain. After a decade of unprecedented economic growth and 26 years of undisputed political hegemony of the FPU, the Spanish cultural atmosphere had lost its doctrinal character, reduced to mere rhetoric. Society was changing at breakneck speed, but the official Party was monolithic and unwavering.
The new petite-bourgoise Spain enthusiastically embraced everything as long as it had an innovative and libertarian aura, but fled terrified of anything that smacked of party politics. Hundreds of minor publications in the style of the time were circulating, combining a pretentious and pseudo-intellectual approach with openly pornographic passages. ENDLESS VICTORY went unnoticed as another example in a saturated market, and Delgado had to wait to earn his deserved consecration as a writer.
In this story, Sanjurjo dies in his victory parade at the hands of a Carlist grenade, and the resulting chaos and power vacuum put the different insurrect factions against one another in a relentless struggle. By 1965, Spain is fragmented into small caudillistic Taifas under the most diverse branches of the Carlist and Falangist doctrines, when not under outright barrack despotism, to wich add a Basque and a Catalan republic in a constant state of siege. Nomadic tribes of Maquis roam abandoned roads in areas of dispute for incursions of harassment, or walk the dangerous ruins of Madrid in search of something to plunder. Spain has returned to the Dark Ages, not only in a poetic sense, and conditions make the Bull Skin a nest of banditry, espionage and smuggling; a haven for outlaws and hustlers.
The protagonist Fernando Santos, a messenger aviator and bounty hunter of CNT past and obsessed with the Bushido code, owes much to the iconography of the Pulp hero threatened by villains of maniacal laughter and femme fatales, although Delgado perverts the stereotype with large doses of surrealism and black humor. But the astonishment of the reader can only increase as the firm of reality crumbles more and more, and its mysterious contractor reveals the purpose of his request: according to the centuries of Nostradamus, the Nationalist victory did not occur in the real world. From there, everything gets really out of hand.
Although Delgado himself eventually rejected his debut as "too hasty and disjointed, a failed acid test", every genre fan should give it a try. Today, this daring and original work can raise anything but indifference.
A very different tone, between melancholy and dirty realism is to be found in NO NEWS OF GOD, written by Agustín Monzón and published in our selection of winners of CIFEX 1984. Undoubtedly worth rescuing.
In this story there are no major macro-structural details, but it can be deduced that Mola, not Sanjurjo, took the insurrect side to victory, "saving" the republic ... that is, reforming it in his own totalitarian lines. NO NEWS OF GOD tells a week in the life of Wenceslao Garcia, a gray and resigned bureaucrat of a decrepit nameless city, just discovering love in the most unexpected way, a love that he knows defeated beforehand. From the terror of daily life and demonstrating a pronounced anthropological Orwellism, we attend an isolated and blind military dictatorship, in which surveillance cameras and the portrait of Mola cover every public or private corner, and propaganda instigates a paranoid fear against the "Neo-Reds" of the Southern Front, against which the State has been twenty years at war… although it is occasionally hinted that Mola died long ago and that such war does not exist. For if it were not obvious which official attitudes Monzon was denouncing ,the flag flying from every official balcony of this dehumanized world is none other than our tricolor. An uninnocent detail that sometimes makes this story an even more disturbing trip, although it came at a time when the scandal was a lost cause.
After the crash of '68, the failure of the Catalan Spring, the fracture of the Hispanidad and the Conservative Revolution of the National Alliance, the political castration had degenerated into a stark pessimism, which was not only reflected in film or music, but also in literature. Obviously this didn’t happen just in Spain, but our particular situation perhaps made it more obvious, with more direct manifestations. Beyond the stereotype of Splatter music and Shock Movies, in the early 80 an entire generation found in the atmosphere of collective catharsis the most effective means of escape the eventual death of the old slogans, although rarely with sensitivity and the political background to this story offers, which prevents it to qualify as a conventional Splatter work. A real tour de force unjustly forgotten.
We end where we began this journey, with Victor Fuentes’ THE SHADOW OF THE EAGLE. At this point, the possibility of historical distance from the story fades, which might do disservice to this critical and commercial success. Much of its genius comes from creating a formal and politically very different world, with great detail, but that ends up not being so departed. One leaves the book with a truly strange, bittersweet sensation, despite its end. The battered and troubled Spain of this book makes us think that our Republic has gone for a walk to the Callejón del Gato.
Most of the book, except for the epilogue, recounts the experiences of Pau P., a young Barcelonese college student of a vaguely libertarian consciousness, in the years before Franco's death in autumn 1975, a Franco who spent nearly 40 years leading the country with an iron fist.
Fuentes places his story in a world where further British pressure made France abandon the Loyalist side to its fate, allowing the lifting of the blockade of the Strait, which brings the army of Africa to the peninsula. The memoirs of Paul display a petty and recessive Spain, even beyond the latent climate of oppression. This quasi-Fascist Spain never accesses the Marshall Plan, and it takes her a decade to join the UN. The economic miracle arrives, but it arrives late and wrong. Spain increasingly cuts ties with Latin America, and submits herself to be little more than a second-tier US puppet. The image that this Spain has projected, away from cartoonish Fascism, is frighteningly folkloric and chauvinist, typical of a culturally empty country, sunk in a brain drain. The official values, however, increasingly clash against those of a population looking towards Europe with envy, as a future to conquer. These are the tensions that give value to the book, garnished of mannerisms and some other details that arouse the reader’s smile ... as this cameo of Manuel Fraga, the Eternal oppositor, becoming minister "of the liberal wing of Fascism" -sic -.
And despite his sinister legacy, how not to be overwhelmed before the description of a decrepit and intubated Franco, whose own decisions have made him die under a nightmarish physical and mental pain! Fuentes has captured not only the structure of a believable world, but has shown an unusual sensitivity to address the human question, inviting us to feel pity even for the worst monsters. This doesn’t elude the most obvious reading: The scheme is in the same state of health as its creator.
But let's go a little further. As I write these lines, a year of the first victory of PNR is marked, after 48 long years since the start of the FPU rule, still fresh the conflicts in the long decade of the National Alliance. The "perfect dictatorship" in the words of Vargas Llosa, has died and will not return. Is not the current climate we breath similar to that of this alternate 1975? Hope, uncertainty. That feeling of being awakened from a long sleep.
Have we been so closed in our own discourse, in our own narcolepsy, as was this "Francoist" Spain? What does the "Basque conflict" tell us our dirty war against Carlism? I leave the answer to the reader.
Much has been made of the epilogue, a fragment criticized for being too optimistic, too discordant with the bittersweet tone of the story. In it, the years have passed and our Pau is a family man, in a 1992 in which Spain has reformed peacefully towards a British-style monarchy that turns her face to Europe, the PSOE has returned to power, and from an Olympic Barcelona, Spain transmits for the first time since long ago an image of dynamism and modernity. The book closes in an almost epic fashion, with a human formation shouting to the world "HELLO" from the Estadi Olimpic de Barcelona.
It’s not for me to criticize this end. It is true that thinking of a playboy like Juan Carlos Borbón playing the role of king requires a prodigious effort. But taking THE SHADOW OF THE EAGLE for what it is, as a glance to the moster of the mirror, I do not consider that a call for optimism is to be ignored. Uncertainty, hope ... optimism. Why not? Allow us, without setting a precedent out of it, a political reading from this newsletter: let’s think about our potential to become again the exemplary society that we believed to be a not so distant time ago. We need only be aware that it is possible, that beyond Splatter slogan "the future is the past," our tiny planet moves at last. As far as I’m concerned, I think they could not have remembered it to us in a more suggestive manner than through a genre, Parahistory, which demands from us introspection and analysis -ultimately, stop and think a bit about who we are.
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