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University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Spring 2013
Conflicting identities in Spain's peripheries:
centralist Spanish nationalism in contemporary
cultural production of Catalonia and the Basque
country
Stephanie Ann Mueller
University of Iowa
Copyright 2013 Stephanie A. Mueller
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2588
Recommended Citation
Mueller, Stephanie Ann. "Conflicting identities in Spain's peripheries: centralist Spanish nationalism in contemporary cultural
production of Catalonia and the Basque country." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2013.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2588.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons
CONFLICTING IDENTITIES IN SPAIN’S PERIPHERIES: CENTRALIST SPANISH
NATIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF
CATALONIA AND THE BASQUE COUNTRY
by
Stephanie Ann Mueller
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Spanish
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2013
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Luis Martín-Estudillo
1
ABSTRACT
This dissertation analyzes symbolic and political discourse in the works of three
controversial intellectuals who participate in the contemporary debate on nationalisms in
Spain. Basque poet and essayist Jon Juaristi (b. 1951), after brief involvement in ETA
during the late 1960s and early 1970s, evolved into one of Spain’s most outspoken critics
of Basque nationalism, a position that led to death threats from ETA and eventually his
permanent abandonment of the region. After founding his theater company Els Joglars in
1962, Catalan playwright Albert Boadella (b. 1943) used it as a vehicle to fight the
Francoist dictatorship and promote a Catalan nationalist agenda. However, he eventually
reversed his position on the issue of Catalan and Spanish nationalisms and became a
political enemy to many in his home region. Finally, Basque filmmaker Julio Medem (b.
1958) caused outrage throughout much of Spain in 2003 with a documentary film
exploring the clash between Spanish and Basque identities. In my examination of
Boadella’s and Juaristi’ autobiographies and Medem’s documentary I explore the ways
each author portrays himself as subverting, transgressing, or transcending the sub-state
nationalisms that are virtually hegemonic in their regions, and I reveal how each author’s
treatment of gender, especially his representations of masculinity, either undermines or
substantiates the purportedly “non-nationalist” position he stakes. I argue that Juaristi’s
and Boadella’s restrictive, traditionalist gender constructions reveal conservative Spanish
nationalist discourses which prevent them from surpassing the rigid power structures that
nourish the opposition between Spain’s center and periphery, while Medem’s cinematic
work does present the possibility of breaking free from the boundaries of the conflict of
national identities through the transcendence of patriarchal nationalist symbolism - both
Basque and Spanish.
2
Abstract Approved:
____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
CONFLICTING IDENTITIES IN SPAIN’S PERIPHERIES: CENTRALIST SPANISH
NATIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF
CATALONIA AND THE BASQUE COUNTRY
by
Stephanie Ann Mueller
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Spanish
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2013
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Luis Martín-Estudillo
Copyright by
STEPHANIE ANN MUELLER
2013
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Stephanie Ann Mueller
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Spanish at the May 2013 graduation.
Thesis Committee: __________________________________
Luis Martín-Estudillo, Thesis Supervisor
__________________________________
Tom Lewis
__________________________________
Denise K. Filios
__________________________________
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez
__________________________________
Corey Creekmur
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would first like to thank my dissertation committee - Luis Martín-Estudillo, Tom
Lewis, Denise Filios, Ana Rodríguez, and Corey Creekmur - for their invaluable input
and guidance. I am especially indebted to my advisor and mentor Luis for challenging
and encouraging me throughout my doctoral studies, and for believing in me and in my
work. I am also grateful to the faculty of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for
helping me to grow as a scholar and teacher. I would especially like to thank Judith
Liskin-Gasparro for her always sound advice and hugs. Thanks also to the departmental
staff for being so reliably helpful and friendly.
A Jon Kortazar, eskerrik asko. Desde el momento en que decidí irme a vivir a
Bilbao, me trataste como una alumna tuya, facilitándome el visado y el carnet
bibliotecario de la Universidad del País Vasco, invitándome a eventos culturales y a
incontables infusiones de manzanilla. Te agradezco tu generosidad y la ayuda y apoyo
que me has dado. Agradezco también a Josep Vicens, Jaume Mateu, Daniel Casals, y
especialmente a Núria Contreras por haberme facilitado acceso a los recursos
bibliotecarios de la Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. Moltes gràcies a Cèlia por su
gran ayuda logística y a Isabella por recibirme en su piso tan amistosamente durante mi
estancia en Barcelona.
I would like to express my gratitude to the Program for Cultural Cooperation
between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities for their financial
support, which enabled me to carry out preliminary research in Bilbao. The generosity of
the Graduate College has also played an essential role in my completion of the
dissertation. The T. Anne Cleary International Dissertation Research Fellowship
permitted me to conduct research at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao and
the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and thanks to the Ballard Seashore Dissertation
Year Fellowship I could dedicate myself to writing while immersing myself in the
ii
Basque and Catalan languages and cultures.
Thanks to my friends, beginning with the monos, who have become another
family to me. Carlos Mario and Raphael, I treasure our never-ending conversations and
have learned so much from both of you. Gonzalo and María Laura, I look up to you in so
many ways. Tiff, I can always count on you and your positive energy. Jen and Felipe,
talking to you two about our shared experiences has been more valuable to me than you
know. Thanks also to Angelique and Maricelle for your advice and support since the start
of my graduate studies, to Brittany and Marta for all those therapeutic chats by phone or
over coffee, to Kate, Sarah, and Alison for always being there when I need to talk, and to
Sarah and Joe for kindly welcoming me (and my emotions) into your home during my
final months of writing.
Me es imposible expresar con palabras mi agradecimiento a mi querida familia
bilbaína por su generosidad y cariño. Gracias, Cari, Fermín, y la Tía Esperanza por
acogerme como a una hija. Igualmente agradecida estoy con toda la familia Gutiérrez,
especialmente Eduardo y Ana, por cuidar de mí durante mi estancia en Barcelona.
I am so thankful for my loving family. I do not have enough pages to thank you
for everything you do. Mom and Dad, thank you for your unfailing moral and material
support throughout my many years of study, for always encouraging me to pursue my
interests, and for believing in my abilities. Brittany and my “other sister” Nicki, I do not
know what I would do without your friendship and support. I am also greatly indebted to
my wonderful grandparents. Grandma Donna, your homemade treats gave me the energy
to endure long writing sessions. Grandma Betty, thanks for always knowing the most
comforting thing to say. To my aunts, uncles, and cousins, thanks for creating a caring
and close-knit support system that I know I can always depend on.
Iván, without your inspiration I would not have begun this project; without your
infinite patience and support I would not have carried it to completion. Thank you for
always being at my side, in spite of the cornfields or oceans between us.
iii
ABSTRACT
This dissertation analyzes symbolic and political discourse in the works of three
controversial intellectuals who participate in the contemporary debate on nationalisms in
Spain. Basque poet and essayist Jon Juaristi (b. 1951), after brief involvement in ETA
during the late 1960s and early 1970s, evolved into one of Spain’s most outspoken critics
of Basque nationalism, a position that led to death threats from ETA and eventually his
permanent abandonment of the region. After founding his theater company Els Joglars in
1962, Catalan playwright Albert Boadella (b. 1943) used it as a vehicle to fight the
Francoist dictatorship and promote a Catalan nationalist agenda. However, he eventually
reversed his position on the issue of Catalan and Spanish nationalisms and became a
political enemy to many in his home region. Finally, Basque filmmaker Julio Medem (b.
1958) caused outrage throughout much of Spain in 2003 with a documentary film
exploring the clash between Spanish and Basque identities. In my examination of
Boadella’s and Juaristi’s autobiographies and Medem’s documentary I explore the ways
each author portrays himself as subverting, transgressing, or transcending the sub-state
nationalisms that are virtually hegemonic in their regions, and I reveal how each author’s
treatment of gender, especially his representations of masculinity, either undermines or
substantiates the purportedly “non-nationalist” position he stakes. I argue that Juaristi’s
and Boadella’s restrictive, traditionalist gender constructions reveal conservative Spanish
nationalist discourses which prevent them from surpassing the rigid power structures that
nourish the opposition between Spain’s center and periphery, while Medem’s cinematic
work does present the possibility of breaking free from the boundaries of the conflict of
national identities through the transcendence of patriarchal nationalist symbolism - both
Basque and Spanish.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 Nationalisms and “Non-nationalisms” in Spain .............................................. 3 Chapter Outlines ............................................................................................ 16 PART I: JON JUARISTI’S LA TRIBU ATRIBULADA AND CAMBIO DE
DESTINO: THE SELF-FASHIONING OF A (STILL) NATIONALIST
INTELLECTUAL.......................................................................................... 21 CHAPTER 1: “CONSTITUTIONAL PATERNALISM”: FATHERHOOD
AND THE STATE IN LA TRIBU ATRIBULADA: EL
NACIONALISMO VASCO EXPLICADO A MI PADRE ............................... 22 Constitutional Patriotism as Dominant Nationalism ..................................... 23 The Law of the Spanish Father and the Basque Maternal Real ..................... 33 Autobiography and Juaristi as Father ............................................................ 49 CHAPTER 2: BASQUE GHOSTS, SPANISH SPECTERS: NATIONALIST
HAUNTINGS IN JON JUARISTI’S CAMBIO DE DESTINO:
MEMORIAS ................................................................................................... 60 Ancestral Voices and Non-Nationalist Ghosts .............................................. 61 The Basque Totalitarian Family .................................................................... 70 Wielding Symbolic Power ............................................................................. 81 The Woman as Ghost................................................................................... 100 Alternative Story or Blindness to the Ghosts? ............................................. 115 PART II: ALBERT BOADELLA’S MEMORIAS DE UN BUFÓN AND ADIÓS,
CATALUÑA: TWO TALES OF ESTRANGEMENT ................................. 125 CHAPTER 3: BECOMING A BUFFOON: THE LIMITS OF
TRANSGRESSION IN MEMORIAS DE UN BUFÓN ............................... 126 Boadella the Buffoon ................................................................................... 127 Rites of Passage (and Exclusion) ................................................................. 135 The “Incestuous” Nation.............................................................................. 145 In Service of the King .................................................................................. 161 CHAPTER 4: FAILED ETHICS: THE ALIENATING POLITICAL
DISCOURSE OF ADIÓS, CATALUÑA. CRÓNICA DE AMOR Y DE
GUERRA ...................................................................................................... 171 A Response to the Other .............................................................................. 172 The Other and the Citizen ............................................................................ 177 Rewriting History ........................................................................................ 191 PART III: JULIO MEDEM’S LA PELOTA VASCA: AN ALTERNATIVE TO
SPANISH NATIONALIST DISCOURSE .................................................. 202 v
CHAPTER 5: RISING ABOVE DANGEROUS TERRITORY: THE
RECONFIGURATION OF BASQUE NATIONALIST SYMBOLISM
IN LA PELOTA VASCA: LA PIEL CONTRA LA PIEDRA ......................... 203 La pelota vasca: Controversy and Criticism ............................................... 203 Fragmentation, Subjectivity, and Symmetry: La pelota vasca and
Medem’s Fictional Oeuvre .......................................................................... 209 Rising above Nationalist Symbolism........................................................... 221 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 240 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 244 vi
1
INTRODUCTION
This dissertation explores one of the most contentious issues in present-day Spain:
the dissonance between centralist Spanish and peripheral sub-state nationalisms. While
Spain is made up of seventeen regions or “autonomous communities,” the 1978 Spanish
Constitution gives the northern communities of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and
Galicia the additional, and deliberately vague, status of nacionalidades históricas
(historical nationalities), in recognition of the cultural and linguistic uniqueness that has
existed in those areas for centuries. This historical difference, which intensified in the
1970s following the end of Francisco Franco’s nationalist and centralist regime, has
contributed to the emergence of sub-state nationalist movements in the three regions, the
most extreme of which is the Basque terrorist separatist organization ETA.1
That sort of nationalism (often labeled “peripheral”) is the one that gets most the
attention in Spain nowadays. Paradoxically, while the Franco regime had a strongly
nationalist bent which was and is shared by many Spaniards, the endurance of this
particular aspect of its political legacy is often ignored or denied. “Spanish nationalism”
is seldom considered in the discussions about the ideological landscape of the democratic
period. In the chapters that follow, I will examine this often overlooked presence of
centralist Spanish nationalism, specifically within Catalonia and the Basque Country.
More precisely, I will analyze the symbolic and political discourse in the works of three
controversial authors from those regions who participate in the contemporary debate on
nationalisms in Spain. The first is Basque poet and essayist Jon Juaristi (b. 1951), who
after brief involvement in ETA during the late 1960s and early 1970s, evolved into one of
Spain’s most outspoken critics of Basque nationalism, a position that led to death threats
1 Euskadi ta Askatasuna (Basque Land and Liberty), was formed in 1959, and between
1968 and 2010 killed 829 victims. In October 2011, ETA announced its most recent ceasefire.
2
from ETA and eventually his permanent abandonment of the region. The second is
Catalan playwright Albert Boadella (b. 1943), who after founding his theater company
Els Joglars in 1962, used it as a vehicle to fight the Francoist dictatorship and promote a
Catalanist agenda. However, he eventually reversed his position on the issue of Catalan
and Spanish nationalisms and became a political enemy to many in his home region.
Finally, Basque filmmaker Julio Medem (b. 1958), one of the most internationally
recognized Spanish directors, caused outrage throughout much of Spain in 2003 with a
documentary film exploring the clash between Spanish and Basque identities. All three
authors, due to their rejection of the sub-state nationalisms that are virtually hegemonic in
their native communities, have been criticized or even perceived as traitors by some of
their fellow Basques and Catalans. Each embraces his position as “outsider,” portraying
himself as free from the deleterious influence of nationalism. The driving question of my
research is whether or not it is possible for one to be “non-nationalist” while working as a
high-profile public intellectual within a context of political tension between center and
periphery.
I explore this question through the interdisciplinary theoretical approach of
cultural studies, focusing especially—but not uniquely—on how the three authors’
representations of gender are inextricably bound up with nationalist political discourse
and identity. In my examination of Juaristi’s and Boadella’s autobiographies and
Medem’s documentary, I will examine the ways each author portrays himself as
subverting, transgressing, or transcending the sub-state nationalisms that are virtually
hegemonic in their regions, and I will reveal how each author’s constructions of
masculinity either undermines or substantiates the purportedly “non-nationalist” position
he stakes. I will argue that Juaristi’s and Boadella’s restrictive, traditionalist gender
constructions reveal conservative Spanish nationalist discourses which prevent them from
surpassing the rigid power structures that nourish the opposition between Spain’s center
and periphery, while Medem’s cinematic work does present the possibility of breaking
3
free from the boundaries of the conflict of national identities through the transcendence
of patriarchal nationalist symbolism - both Basque and Spanish.
Nationalisms and “Non-nationalisms” in Spain
The tension between centralizing and decentralizing tendencies in Spain has a
long history. The unification of the crowns of Castile and Aragon under Isabel and
Fernando in 1492 and the corresponding standardization of Castilian beginning with
Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492) marked what has been
traditionally presented as the consolidation of a Castile-centered Spanish identity, already
taking shape in the late Middle Ages, and heralded the rise in Castile’s supremacy over
the course of the sixteenth century and its conflation with Spain as a whole. The
centralizing efforts continued into the eighteenth century under the Bourbon regime,
which eliminated Catalan self-governance (the fueros) in 1714, though it was in the
nineteenth century when Spain began to be articulated as a nation and interiorized by its
people as such. Henry Kamen points to the 1808 Spanish uprisings against Napoleon’s
forces and the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz, which envisioned a unified Spanish patria, as
the key events around which the idea of Spain as a nation was born (1-2). The nineteenth
century is also the period when non-Castilian nationalisms began to emerge in response
to the State’s nation-consolidating efforts justified through a Castile-centered Spanish
nationalist discourse. Rooted in regionalist cultural movements in Catalonia and Galicia the Renaixença and the Rexurdimento, respectively - and in the Basque Country in Carlist
opposition to liberalism and the threat it posed to the Basque fueros (eliminated in 1876),
these expressions of non-Castilian identities had taken the form of nationalist movements
by the early twentieth century. In the Basque Country, Sabino Arana had already initiated
full-fledged nationalist discourse in the 1880s. Under the Second Republic (1931-1939),
a regime more open to the political expression of Spain’s cultural plurality than those it
followed (under military dictator Primo de Rivera) and preceded (Francisco Franco’s
4
authoritarian state), Catalonia passed its 1932 Statute of Autonomy, and the Basque
Country and Galicia had proposed theirs shortly before the eruption of the Civil War in
1936.
As is well known, the Francoist dictatorship imposed a traditionalist Catholic,
Castile-centered Spanish national identity and repressed Spain’s non-Castilian languages
and cultures. Beginning in the late 1950s, Spain’s government opened up to economic
modernization and the international community, abandoning to some degree the
extremely harsh repression that characterized the post-war years and opening a space for
clandestine cultural and political activism in the Basque Country and Catalonia aimed at
ending the dictatorship and recuperating non-Castilian national identities. Both Jon
Juaristi and Albert Boadella participated in this anti-Francoist resistance in their
respective regions, Juaristi as a low-level ETA member in the late 1960s and leftist
activist in the 1970s, and Boadella as a leading figure of Catalonia’s independent theater
movement in the 1960s and 70s, which formed part of a broader network of leftistCatalanist cultural groups organized in resistance to Franco. In my analysis of their
autobiographies, I will discuss how their depiction of this period of activism upholds their
present-day ideologies.
During the transition to democracy following Franco’s 1975 death, political
leaders from various parties worked to transform Spain into a Western-style
parliamentary democracy. The members of the committee in charge of drafting the 1978
Constitution included representatives of the Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD), a
moderate Christian-democratic coalition led by Adolfo Suárez and which predominated
over the committee thanks to their three-members in comparison to the other parties’ one,
the conservative Alianza Popular (AP), which was founded by former Francoist leaders,
including its leader Manuel Fraga (and which would later become the People’s Party or
PP), the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Partido Comunista de España
(PCE), and the Catalan nationalist Convergència Democrática de Catalunya (which
5
joined the Unió Democrática de Catalunya in 1978 to form Convergència i Unió, or CiU).
Notably absent from the Constitutional committee is the Partido Nacionalista Vasco
(PNV), which was to be represented by the Catalan nationalist representative Miquel
Roca, a proposal the PNV rejected. Galician parties were basically marginalized from the
Madrid-based political maneuverings of the transition.
As Sebastian Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga detail in their study of this process,
each party aimed to “reinvent” Spain according to its own vision, as is evidenced by the
debates that took place around the language that was to be employed in the Constitution’s
description of the new Spanish State. The necessary compromises between those distinct
visions resulted in the semantic ambiguity that characterizes the document. For example,
while the preamble refers to “los pueblos españoles,” a phrase that recognizes Spain’s
cultural plurality, the remainder of the text employs the singular “el pueblo español,”
emphasizing a single, overarching Spanish culture and identity (Balfour and Quiroga 55).
The most noteworthy example of the ambiguity that resulted from the compromises
between the conservatives’ centralizing aims and the Basque and Catalan nationalists’
demands for autonomy is the way that Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia were
defined in the Constitution. The term “nacionalidades históricas” recognizes the
historical cultural and linguistic differences in those regions, yet at the same time,
because the word “nation” is limited to describing only the Spanish nation, the former
term functions to deny the sub-state nationalities the right to sovereignty reserved for the
Spanish nation (54). In addition to its status as a historical nationality, which expedited its
process of obtaining a statue of autonomy, the Basque Country (along with Navarra) was
granted a greater degree of fiscal autonomy than the autonomous communities (called the
concierto económico), justified by the exceptional duration of the foral government in the
Basque Country and Navarra. These compromises, though, were insufficient from the
Basque nationalists’ point of view, and the PNV promoted abstention among its
supporters in the constitutional referendum. At least partly as a consequence of this
6
rejection on the part of the PNV, for many Basque nationalists the 1978 Constitution
lacks legitimacy, a phenomenon that, as I will further explore below, Juaristi and his
fellow Basque “constitutional patriots” fight against.
Coming off the heels of the ratification of the Constitution was the approval of the
Basque, Catalan and Galician Statutes of Autonomy in 1979 and 1980 (Catalonia would
amend its statute in 2006 to expand the Generalitat’s competencies), followed in 1982
and 1983 by the three autonomous governments’ passing of laws of “linguistic
normalization” aimed at increasing the acquisition and use of Basque, Catalan, and
Galician after decades of Francoist repression. The language policies constituted but one
aspect of the nationalist-oriented culture planning by the Basque and Catalan, and to a
lesser degree Galician, governments. These nation-building policies in the linguistic,
cultural, and educational realms were implemented in Catalonia and the Basque Country
with broad public support by CiU and the PNV, both of which won control of their
respective regions in the first autonomous elections of 1980 and held on to it for over two
decades.2 The support enjoyed by these two moderate nationalist parties’ came in part
thanks to the favor they had gained through their association with the anti-Francoist
opposition movement. As will become clear in my discussion of their works, the
democratic transition and subsequent rise in predominance of sub-state nationalism in
Catalonia and the Basque Country was a pivotal moment not only in twentieth-century
Spanish history, but also in Juaristi’s and Boadella’s individual ideological
transformations as they recount them in their autobiographies.
At this point is it imperative that I address the fact that the virtually hegemonic
position enjoyed by nationalists in Catalonia and the Basque Country, as is evidenced by
CiU’s and the PNV’s preponderance within the Basque and Catalan autonomous
2 CiU led the Generalitat from 1980-2003 and 2010 to the present. PNV held the majority
in the Basque Government from 1980-2009 and from 2012 to the present.
7
governments throughout the democratic period, is not paralleled in Galicia. Instead of by
the galeguista parties, Galician politics have been dominated by the Galician branch of
the state-level PP throughout much of the democratic period, the most notable example
being Manuel Fraga’s lengthy tenure as president of Galicia’s autonomous government
(1989-2005). That Fraga had been a prominent minister within the Francoist regime is
indicative that a clean break did not take place between Spain’s dictatorial and
democratic governments, especially in Galicia. As Dolores Vilavedra contends, both
Galicia’s exclusion from the politics of the transition and the continuation of Fraga’s
leadership from one regime to the other are signs that the transition is still incomplete in
Galicia (117-18). This notion of the unfinished transition is not restricted to Galicia, and
it will come up frequently in this dissertation. For now, I cite these examples to highlight
that the shift in power and accompanying implementation of sub-state nation-making
agendas that took place in both the Basque Country and Catalonia did not occur to the
same extent in Galicia. As Thomas Harrington explains, since the nineteenth century
galeguismo has tended to trail behind Basque nationalism and catalanismo in its demands
for autonomy from central Spanish governments as well as in its degree of influence in
autonomous-level, and by extension state-level, politics (119). For this reason, according
to Harrington, Galicia’s cultural and linguistic policies have not been as politically
impactful as the Basque and Catalan versions: “the link between such [culture planning]
activities and real political change had always been much more tenuous there than in
Catalonia or the Basque Country” (124). Thus, even though criticisms have been voiced
by intellectuals like the writer Alfredo Conde (b. 1945) and Marcial Gondar Portasany (b.
1948) of the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela about the linguistic dominance of
Galician in Galicia’s cultural institutions - to the detriment of Spanish-language
producers, it is argued - (Harrington 131), galeguista dominance in the cultural realm,
especially within the literary system, does not correlate to the broader political
establishment the way that it does in the Basque and Catalan cases. This difference was
8
decisive as I determined the scope of my study, which centers on minority opposition to
sub-state nationalist hegemony within the so-called historical nationalities, a hegemony
that exists only in the Basque and Catalan autonomous communities.
As I have mentioned above, this dissertation focuses on the voices within the
Basque Country and Catalonia that have gained force since the 1990s in opposition to the
sub-state nationalisms that have prevailed in those regions since the transition to
democracy. It is to this phenomenon that I shall now turn. Juaristi and Boadella form part
of a small but outspoken group of intellectuals from the Basque Country and Catalonia
who for the past two decades have been publicly articulating their criticisms of Basque
and Catalan nationalisms. In the Basque Country figures like Fernando Savater, Juan
Pablo Fusi, Juan Aranzadi, Carlos Martínez Gorriarán, Antonio Elorza, Mikel
Azurmendi, and Patxo Unzueta have all famously spoken out against nationalism, which
they view, to a large degree like Juaristi, as a pernicious phenomenon limited to Spain’s
peripheries, namely Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. Likewise, in Catalonia
Boadella is joined by public intellectuals like Arcadi Espada, Félix de Azúa, Félix
Ovejero, Francesc de Carreras and Iván Tubau in denouncing Catalan nationalism.
Although these intellectuals represent a minority opinion, their influence is by no
means insubstantial. In the Basque Country these figures, including Juaristi, have been
involved in influential civic groups like ¡Basta Ya! and Foro Ermua - founded in 1997
and 1998 respectively - that condemn ETA, express solidarity with terrorist victims, and
reject the nationalist hegemony that, in their view, is at least indirectly complicit in the
persistence of terrorism. In Catalonia, Boadella and his peers formed the Foro Babel
organization in 1996 to lobby against CiU’s linguistic normalization policies, which they
saw as discriminatory toward Catalans who prefer to speak Spanish, and in 2005 created
the Ciutadans de Catalunya party as an alternative to the nationalist agenda it perceived
as having taken over Catalan politics entirely. Finally, the party Unión, Progreso y
Democracia (UPyD), founded in 2007, is an example of an initiative in which Basques
9
(like Savater, Martínez Gorriarán, and former PSOE politician Rosa Díez) and Catalans
(like Boadella) joined forces to take their re-centralizing efforts to the state level. The
increasing public demand for alternatives to the PNV’s and CiU’s particular nationalist
visions became clear when both parties temporarily lost their majority rule during the
past decade. From 2009 to 2012 the Partido Socialista de Euskadi, in a coalition with
Euskadiko Ezkerra (PSE-EE) and headed by Francisco Javier “Patxi” López, interrupted
the PNV’s previously unbroken control of the Basque government. In Catalonia, the
“Tripartit”, another Socialist-led coalition made up of three leftist parties, took control of
the Generalitat from Jordi Pujol and CiU from 2003 to 2010, with first Pasqual Maragall
and then José Montilla serving as President during that time.3
These public figures leading the anti-nationalist movement within the Basque
Country and Catalonia identify (and are identified) as “non-nationalists,” “postnationalists,” “heterodoxos,” or “constitutional patriots,” which are labels that I will call
into question in my study of Juaristi’s and Boadella’s self-writing. Historian Juan Pablo
Fusi clearly delineates the nationalist/non-nationalist dichotomy that these intellectuals
uphold. Fusi understands the “alternative” voices like Juaristi’s or Savater’s as
representative of a “non-nationalist” tradition that, though often ignored, has always
coexisted alongside the nationalism that has overruled these communities throughout the
past century (9). He defines non-nationalism as a social identity which is liberated from
politicization and which promotes individual rights, civil liberties, civic values, and an
open, plural, and free society. In contrast, he characterizes Basque nationalism as an
irrational, exclusivist force which employs myths to coerce, deny human rights, and
politicize individuals while constructing and imposing upon its members an artificial
national identity (317-18). In the chapters that follow I will show how Juaristi’s and
Boadella’s narratives conform to this dichotomy and how it limits them.
3 Both CiU and the PNV regained majority rule in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
10
One effect of nationalist/non-nationalist binary is that it denies the existence of
Spanish nationalism in the present democratic period against which Basque and Catalan
nationalisms define themselves. The prevalent notion that Spanish nationalism died with
Franco has been dismantled by insightful studies like Xosé Manuel Núñez-Seixas’s,
which unravels the multiple discursive strategies employed by Spain’s left and right in
their efforts to redefine the Spanish nation since the transition, many of which aim to
protect the territorial integrity of Spain by undermining sub-state nationalisms,
associating them with ethnocentric totalitarianism while simultaneously “rebranding”
Spanish nationalism as all-inclusive constitutional patriotism (737). More recently, Brad
Epps’s biting critique the Spanish right’s limited interpretation of Jürgen Habermas’s
notion of constitutional patriotism reveals how, in spite of its ostensible goals, it in fact
functions to drive forward a “disavowed but still potent Spanish nationalist project”
(547). Following Núñez and Epps, this dissertation questions the prevalent assumption
reinforced by Juaristi, Boadella, and their fellow “non-nationalists,” that nationalism,
often viewed in much of Spain as a destructive political force, exists only in Spain’s
peripheries. Instead, I will posit that Juaristi’s and Boadella’s arguments align with
discourses of conservative Spanish nationalism. My argument is supported by the striking
similarities between Juaristi’s and Boadella’s portrayals of their native communities’
political environments; this likeness suggests a common centralist Spanish narrative that
underlies the specific claims they make against Catalan and Basque demands for
increased autonomy. Both Juaristi and Boadella undermine the legitimacy of Basque and
Catalan nationalisms by depicting them as irrational, undemocratic, and politically
immature or retrograde. And they employ many of the same metaphors in their
depictions, liking nationalisms to totalitarianism (the Inquisition and Nazism, in
particular), to psychological disorder, to brainwashing, and to deficiencies in masculinity,
all of which I unpack in my discussions of their autobiographies.
11
A second effect of the nationalist/non-nationalist binary that underlies Juaristi’s
and Boadella’s understanding of their supposed “non-nationalist” positions within
nationalist communities is that it highlights the artificially constructed nature of the
Basque and Catalan nations in contrast to a Spanish nation that is a natural, inevitable
outcome of history. This dissertation follows scholars like Benedict Anderson and Eric
Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger in their understanding of nations as “imagined
communities” (Anderson, Imagined Communities) that are based upon and maintained
through “invented traditions,” (Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition) as
well as another prominent proponent of the modernist approach to nationalism, Ernest
Gellner, who links the rise of the nation-state as the predominant form of political
organization to the transition from feudalism to capitalism as the dominant mode of
production, therefore locating the origin of the nation in the eighteenth century
(Nationalism). Thus, far from defending an essentialist concept of a primordial Basque or
Catalan nation by denying the deliberate nation-building efforts that trouble Juaristi and
Boadella (and Medem, as we shall see), this dissertation is interested in examining the
competing roles of state- and regional-level institutions in the formation of collective
identities in Spain and how they are portrayed and discussed from a literary and filmic
standpoint. This means that I also recognize and examine Spanish nation-building
processes and discourses, which are concealed in Juaristi’s and Boadella’s
nationalist/non-nationalist binary.
As I mention above, Kamen points to the early nineteenth century as the
beginning of the modern Spanish nation. Yet nationalist discourse tends to root the nation
much further in the past. Kamen identifies the sixteenth century as an especially plentiful
source of the myths that cultivate Spanish national identity. He then goes on to
deconstruct the notion that there was already a cohesive Spanish identity in the Early
Modern period, explaining that before 1700, when a unified State began to take form on
the peninsula, “Spaniards” did not share one common language, culture or government,
12
and that their loyalty lay with their city or region of origin (16-17), and that until the
nineteenth century, Spain was nothing more than an abstract, administrative body which
had not yet penetrated the local, intimate level of its peoples’ lives. For this reason,
Kamen problematizes the word “separatism,” which is commonly used to describe the
peripheral regions’ various forms of resistance to Castile-centered unification efforts in
different historical moments. For Kamen, the word “separatism” inaccurately implies that
there ever existed a unified Spanish entity from which to break off in the first place (21).
Even though Spanish, Basque, and Catalan nationalist discourse roots those nations far
back in history, I align with Kamen’s view that the nineteenth century saw the
consolidation of the idea of Spain as a nation, as we understand the term today, and the
start of the first deliberate nation-making efforts in the peripheries.
One of the reasons that Spanish nationalism often goes unrecognized is that the
construction of the Spanish nation began much earlier than that of the Basque, Catalan, or
Galician nations. As Antón Figueroa explains, the nation-making objectives of cultural
and academic institutions are most apparent in the initial phases of a nation’s formation
and become naturalized over time. For this reason, he argues, Spanish historical discourse
is characterized as objective fact, while the history written from the perspective of
minority nations is deemed ideological invention; Spanish literary movements are viewed
as universal, and those from minority nations provincial; and nations consolidated in the
nineteenth century appear natural, while nations emerging later seem inappropriately
anachronistic (209). Many scholars who focus on Spain’s non-Castilian cultural
production, including Figueroa, identify problems associated with those regions’ openly
nationalistic cultural institutions, such as the lack of autonomy in the academic realm
(219), the potential loss of vitality, and consequently readership, due to
“‘museumization,’ endogamy and interventionism” (Vilavedra 131), the restrictive
pressure on writers to publish only in the non-Castilian language (Kortazar 138-39), and
the compromising of artistic risk-taking due to dependence on government funding
13
(Crameri 97). For these same reasons Boadella and Juaristi criticize the
institutionalization of culture in Catalonia and the Basque Country, and both of them
recount having been denied subsidies from the Catalan and Basque governments due to
their refusal to conform to their nationalist narratives. However, in spite of their
professed exclusion from regional institutions, it is my contention that Boadella and
Juaristi are neither politically independent nor ideologically neutral, as they both
maintain; I will show that in fact they are, in the words of Itamar Even-Zohar, “sociosemiotic entrepeneurs,” meaning that the work they produce functions to “justify,
sanction, and substantiate the existence, desirability and pertinence” of a particular nation
(52). In their case, it is the Spanish nation. The difference between Boadella’s and
Juaristi’s work and those of their Catalan or Basque nationalist peers, though, is that the
state-wide institutions through which they gain authority are less visible. Drawing on
Bourdieuian concepts, I argue that the state institutions in which Boadella and Juaristi
function as cultural agents belong to the category of “doxa,” or a seemingly self-evident
order, which makes them more powerful than the regional institutions functioning at the
perceptible level of “orthodoxy” (Distinction). I will show how they capitalize upon their
privileged positions within these naturalized Spanish institutions to assert their authority
over and delegitimize Basque and Catalan nationalists.
Like Boadella and Juaristi, Medem has also on various occasions publicly
denounced the Basque governments’ policies on funding cultural production for what he
sees as their marginalization of lesser known, aesthetically innovative filmmakers
(Medem qtd. in Etxebeste Gómez 20-21). And also like Boadella and Juaristi, Medem
enjoys institutional financial support from the State for his work. However, as I posit in
Chapter Five, the widespread backlash that Medem’s documentary La pelota vasca: La
piel contra la piedra (2003) caused was a consequence of its (at least attempted)
eschewal of both Basque and Spanish nationalist narratives, making it an alternative to
the discourses that limit Juaristi’s and Boadella’s works. For example, I argue on the one
14
hand that Boadella’s and Juaristi’s accounts of twentieth-century Spanish history in their
autobiographies involve revisions or omissions that reveal their alignment with the
official narrative of the transition to democracy that, through the pacto del olvido, sought
to bury the traumatic dictatorial past.4 On the other hand, I interpret Medem’s
documentary’s non-linear structure as a rejection of teleological nationalist narratives,
whether Spanish or Basque.
Yet another effect of Boadella’s and Juaristi’s division of Basques and Catalans
into exclusive “nationalist” and “non-nationalist” categories is that it fails to take into
account the complex identitarian dynamics of the historical nationalities, where
competing state- and regional-level institutions have fostered dual identities (Balfour and
Quiroga 161). My analysis of their works challenges the established view of a strictly
bipolar conflict between centralist and peripheral forces, revealing a more nuanced
interplay of national identities. I support Catalan philosopher Xavier Rubert de Ventós’s
contention that a political structure more flexible than the nation-state may be the best
way to recognize the historical nationalities’ diversity. Arguing that the nation-state is an
outdated form of political organization which fails to adequately represent the complex
and multi-faceted individuals and collectivities under its dominion, Rubert de Ventós
proposes, somewhat ironically, that it be replaced by the OPNI, or “objeto político no
identificado” (154). He defines the OPNI as a political structure that is flexible, fluid,
practical and specific, rather than mythical, abstract, and universalizing, and it would be
based upon a constitution that is a constant work-in-progress as opposed to a fixed, pre4 The continuing polemics surrounding the Real Academia de la Historia’s 2011
publication of the Diccionario Biográfico Español, which portrays Franco as a valiant leader of a
just war, suggests that the Second Republic was “prácticamente dictatorial,” and insists that the
Francoist regime was “autoritario pero no totalitario,” is evidence of a continued insistence within
state institutions on revising, justifying, or forgetting certain aspects of the dictatorial period
(“Franco, ese (no tan mal) hombre.” El País. May 30, 2011.
http://www.publico.es/culturas/378862/autoritario-no-totalitario; “Autoritario, no totalitario.”
Público.es. May 28, 2011.
http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2012/02/10/actualidad/1328898316_256044.html).
15
determined design (83). According to Rubert de Ventós, the OPNI would also be more
tolerant to internal diversity than the nation-state, with its tendencies toward unification
and marginalization of non-normative identities.
One of the ways that nationalism tends to exclude non-normative identities is by
upholding traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity. The interconnection of
discourses on gender and nation is a central theme of this dissertation. In particular, my
analyses of the three authors’ works will explore how their constructions of masculinity,
and in Boadella’s case femininity as well, are linked to their conceptions of nationhood.
Drawing on Michael Kimmel’s work on hegemonic definitions of masculinity, Joane
Nagel’s theories on the intertwined evolution of nationalism and Western masculine
ideals, and the work of scholars like Giuliana di Febo who focus specifically Spanish
discourses on gender and nation, I will uncover how Juaristi and Boadella delegitimize
non-Spanish and leftist political identities through emasculation, conflating legitimate
authority with traditionalist notions of manhood. As Judith Kegan Gardiner explains, one
of the successes of feminist-oriented masculinity studies is our current understanding that
“ . . . masculinity, too, is a gender and therefore that men as well as women have
undergone historical and cultural processes of gender formation that distribute power and
privilege unevenly” (Gardiner, “Introduction” 11). In my view, this work of exposing the
way that hegemonic masculinity is constructed and institutionalized in different societies,
in spite of its “appearance of permanence, stability, and naturalness” (11), is analogous to
the efforts of scholars like André Lecours, Geneviève Nootens, and Stephen Tierney to
uncover the often unquestioned dominance of majority nationalisms within multinational
states, which are likewise perceived as universal and unchanging. Indeed, both
hegemonic masculinities and nationalisms define themselves as neutral through
opposition to particular Others; the former contrasts itself with emasculate or female
Others, and the latter with “artificial,” “provincial” nationalisms. The overlapping of
these two processes of “othering” in Juaristi’s and Boadella’s discourses will become
16
clear in my analyses of their work. Thus, my “gendering” of the supposedly natural or
unquestionable definitions of masculinity proposed by Juaristi and Boadella goes hand in
hand with my challenge to the assumption that the Spanish nation is a self-evident reality.
Gardiner also observes that “[m]asculinity is a nostalgic formation, always missing, lost,
or about to be lost, its ideal form located in a past that advances with each generation in
order to recede just beyond its grasp. Its myth is that effacing new forms can restore a
natural, original male grounding” (Gardiner, “Introduction” 10). In its characteristic
nostalgia, masculinity yet again resembles nationalism, which seeks to ground itself in a
distant past through myth and tradition, and in the historical nationalities especially,
which have never seen their nations materialized in the form of sovereign states, this
narrative is configured as one of historical losses. In my discussion of La pelota vasca in
Chapter Five, with the help of Joseba Zulaika’s study of rural Basque cultures’
cultivation of antagonistic nationalism and Nancy J. Chodorow’s discussion of
masculinity and aggression, I will explore how Medem brings to light and calls into
question the mutual production of traditional, and especially violent, forms of masculinity
and nationalism in the Basque Country.
Chapter Outlines
Part One is dedicated to one of Basque nationalism’s most (in)famous critics, Jon
Juaristi. In Chapter One I discuss his 2002 autobiographical essay La tribu atribulada. El
nacionalismo vasco explicado a mi padre, in which he directly addresses his father, from
whom he had inherited his Basque nationalist leanings as an adolescent. My analysis
centers on Juaristi’s portrayal of fatherhood through his use of Lacanian psychoanalytical
theory. I reveal his conflation of legitimate authority with paternal figures embodying the
traditional masculine ideals of independence, courage, and aggression, and call into
question the purportedly neutral constitutional patriotism he endorses through these
patriarchal discourses.
17
In Chapter Two I examine Juaristi’s 2006 autobiography Cambio de destino:
Memorias. In it, Juaristi employs a metaphor of haunting as he narrates his rejection of
the Basque nationalist legacy he inherited from his elders and his subsequent adoption of
an alternative, purportedly “non-nationalist,” lineage. To do this, he constructs an
opposition between two types of ghosts. He characterizes Basque nationalist ghosts as
dangerous ancestral voices constantly threatening to reemerge and seduce new
generations of young men into fighting for an ethnic nationalism incompatible with
democracy. In contrast, the non-nationalist ghosts that Juaristi opts to join become
spectral when they dismiss the ancestral voices, defend democracy, and consequently
disappear from the unwelcoming nationalist community. Informed by Avery Gordon’s
theory of the ghost as a marginalized social figure, I challenge Juaristi’s purported
ghostly nature, and I reveal how the Spanish nationalist discourses to which Juaristi
adheres blind him to the ghosts at the margins of his own narrative.
Catalan playwright Albert Boadella’s autobiographical writing is the subject of
Part Two. In Chapter Three I analyze his first autobiography Memorias de un bufón
(2001), revealing its structure to be a series of rites of passage through which Boadella
reaches full manhood and ideological independence, thereby gaining his credentials as a
public intellectual. He expresses his independence from what he considers the suffocating
and incestuous cultural and political environment of Catalonia by adopting the
transgressive role of the court jester. I will problematize Boadella’s supposed
transgression, arguing that his rejection of non-normative definitions of masculinity and
femininity, and his association of them with what he perceives as the illegitimacy of
Catalan nationalist and leftist political movements, aligns him with the discourses of a
conservative Spanish nationalism that his narrative of supposed transgression seeks to
conceal.
Chapter Four’s main argument is that in his second autobiography Adiós,
Cataluña. Crónica de amor y de guerra (2007), Boadella’s telling of his life story
18
constitutes an even more explicit political action, for it aligns seamlessly with the
manifesto of the anti-Catalan nationalist political party, Ciutadans de Catalunya, that he
helped to create in 2005. In Adiós, Cataluña, the path toward independence that Boadella
initiated in Memorias de un bufón culminates in his complete alienation from Catalan
society. Drawing on Angel Loureiro’s theory of the autobiographical genre based on
Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of ethics, as well as on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of
communicative action, I will attribute Boadella’s failure to meaningfully communicate
with his fellow Catalans, in spite of his repeated efforts to reach out to them, to restrictive
Spanish nationalist political discourses that dismiss and vilify, rather than take into
account, the points of view of Catalanist and leftist Others.
In Part III I shift my focus away from the conservative Spanish nationalist
discourse that dominates Juaristi’s and Boadella’s works and explore what I view as an
alternative approach to the conflicting national identities and narratives in contemporary
Spain. This final section is also unique from the preceding two in that it analyzes a
cinematic, rather than autobiographical, rendering of the conflict of Basque and Spanish
nationalisms. In Chapter Five I will address some of the prevailing criticisms that have
been directed toward Julio Medem’s controversial documentary La pelota vasca: la piel
contra la piedra since its 2003 release. These include, among others, the prevalence of
Basque nationalist symbolism and tropes, such as its use of rural Basque landscapes as
backdrops for interviews and its integration of film clips and images by artists like Jorge
Oteiza and Nestor Basterretxea who in the 1950s and 1960s engaged in a deliberate
political effort to establish (or in their view, revive) a uniquely Basque aesthetic. Along
with these elements adopted from Basque nationalist tradition, I will also examine his
portrayal of rural Basque sports and their connection to male-dominated ETA violence.
Studies of the documentary thus far have not taken into consideration its critical
treatment of rural Basque constructions of gender. It may be in part due to this omission
that many critics have found fault with the film’s use of Basque imagery, accusing
19
Medem of slipping into nationalist essentialism. My analysis shows that La pelota vasca
offers alternative ways of perceiving nationalist symbols and social structures, thereby
escaping and exposing the roots of the polarized aggression that characterizes the
Basque-Spanish conflict. Rather than uncritically celebrating Basque aesthetic and rural
traditions, I posit that Medem appropriates them so as to expose their violent and
exclusionary effects on Basque society. This is, in my view, what differs La pelota vasca
from Juaristi’s and Boadella’s treatment of sub-state nationalisms, for instead of adopting
a dismissive, rationalist discourse supported by the institutional authority of the Spanish
State, it critically engages with Basque visual and historical narratives.
I have selected these three figures in part for the considerable influence that their
works have had on public discourse surrounding issues of nationalism in contemporary
Spain. As will come to light in the chapters that follow, Juaristi, Boadella, and Medem
are ever-present in the Spanish, Basque, and Catalan press, and they are relatively well
known to the general public. This public status has permitted them to shape the statewide nationalist debate and in Boadella’s case, even Catalan and Spanish political
institutions. My choice to focus primarily on Juaristi’s and Boadella’s autobiographical
writings, as opposed to Juaristi’s poetry or Boadella’s dramatic works, stems from my
interest in how these authors take advantage of their fame to deploy their own life stories
in the service of a particular ideology. My study of Medem centers on La pelota vasca
because this documentary constitutes the filmmaker’s most overt treatment of Basque
nationalism and resulted in public attacks directed not only toward the film, but also
toward Medem, due to what some perceived as his political bias and immoral stances. In
my view, the public attention that Juaristi’s, Boadella’s, and Medem’s works and
personal stories have garnered makes critical analyses of their narratives imperative. In
particular, I aim to uncover the frequently overlooked gender contructs in these works
and their relationship to nationalist discourses, an aspect that is still to a large degree
understudied and that is fundamental to a complete understanding of the relationship
20
between competing nationalisms in contemporary Spain. Thus, while in its study of the
work of three male intellectuals this dissertation admittedly risks perpetuating the
marginalization of women’s voices in a public debate dominated by men, its goal is to
better understand the gender discourses tied up in the dominant narratives of “nonnationalism,” and how they function to either further exclude or engage with feminist
perspectives.
21
PART I: JON JUARISTI’S LA TRIBU ATRIBULADA AND CAMBIO DE
DESTINO: THE SELF-FASHIONING OF A (STILL) NATIONALIST
INTELLECTUAL
22
CHAPTER 1: “CONSTITUTIONAL PATERNALISM”: FATHERHOOD
AND THE STATE IN LA TRIBU ATRIBULADA: EL NACIONALISMO
VASCO EXPLICADO A MI PADRE
In his 2002 essay La tribu atribulada: El nacionalismo vasco explicado a mi
padre Juaristi explains how the Basque nationalism supported by his estranged father
harms both their relationship and the Spanish State. He focuses his criticism on Basque
nationalists’ and leftists’5 rejection of the Spanish State’s authority as sanctioned by the
1978 Constitution. Dividing La tribu atribulada into two sections, Juaristi seeks to
demonstrate the lawlessness of Basque nationalism by tracing its dysfunctional
relationship with two different institutions: the Church and the State. He claims that
nationalist and leftist priests and politicians in the Basque Country have a history of
perverting precisely those two institutions which they are meant to defend, opting instead
for the antithesis of law and order: la Tribu.
Through numerous examples of good and bad father figures, Juaristi reveals that
the ideal father - and by extension, the ideal state - courageously and aggressively
defends his authority against those who question it. In this section, through an analysis of
Juaristi’s portrayal of paternal figures in La tribu atribulada, I will identify the culturally
exclusive and rigid nature of the purportedly neutral constitutional patriotism endorsed by
Juaristi and establish that Juaristi’s conflation of legitimate authority with paternal figures
embodying the traditional masculine ideals of independence, courage, and aggression
reveal that the order he upholds is a strictly patriarchal one. I will also demonstrate that
Juaristi’s depiction of Basque leftists and nationalists as cowardly and infantile
constitutes an effort to delegitimize his political enemies by emasculating them. Finally,
5 Juaristi’s definition of leftists, or “progres,” encapsulates all political parties, including
the centrist PSOE, which fall ideologically to the left of the conservative PP and which privilege
a more lenient approach than the PP toward sub-state nationalisms.
23
my examination of Juaristi’s use of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the autobiographical
genre will reveal that with La tribu atribulada Juaristi aims to establish himself, and by
extension his generation of “constitutional patriots,” as paternal figures who, upon
replacing his father’s generation, will restore law and order to his homeland by
assimilating it into the Spanish nation and locking future generations into a rigid,
conservative political structure aimed at eliminating challenges to the centralist and
patriarchal viewpoint to which he adheres.
Constitutional Patriotism as Dominant Nationalism
With fatherhood as its central theme, La tribu atribulada provides numerous
examples of what are by Juaristi’s standards either effective or deficient paternal figures.
Many of these examples are priests, two of whom Juaristi and his father knew intimately
and who are described with greater detail than the others. These two priests embody
divergent political viewpoints and they each influence Juaristi and his father in radically
different ways. To simplify their positions, Juaristi refers to them as “el Cura Liberal”
and “el Cura Nacionalista” (37). Not surprisingly, the one with whom Juaristi identifies is
the liberal Joseba, Juaristi’s uncle and his father’s older brother, and Juaristi’s description
of Joseba establishes him as an exemplary father figure. Juaristi points out that Joseba’s
influence on his father was limited due to their substantial age difference and the fact that
Joseba lived most of his life abroad. Joseba had begun his studies at the seminary in
Vitoria when the Spanish Civil War broke out, leading him to transfer to Bayonne. After
the war, Joseba was assigned to a church in Barakaldo, a town near Bilbao, but after
clashing with the town’s Francoist mayor, Joseba requested a missionary assignment and
was sent to Cuba. Following the Cuban Revolution, he lived for several years in Miami,
until finally, not long before his death, he returned to Bilbao for good in the late 1970s.
Juaristi notes that when Joseba would go home to visit, he seemed to his brothers and
24
sisters-in-law a self-important “pelmazo” who was always asking to be driven to and
from countless meetings around Spain (25).
In contrast, for Juaristi, who had the chance to form a close bond with him after
he moved back to Bilbao, Joseba was “una de las personalidades más fascinantes que me
ha sido dado conocer” (25). Even before starting his daily chats with Joseba in Bilbao,
Juaristi had become acquainted with his intellectual influences by reading his book
collection from his seminary years. Juaristi came across the books at his grandparents’
house in Joseba’s old bedroom, the room that Juaristi sometimes occupied when he was
having conflicts at home as a teenager6. This transfer from his father’s house to Joseba’s
bedroom is symbolic of Juaristi’s eventual replacement of Basque nationalist politics for
Joseba’s traditional liberalism. Before getting to know him well, Juaristi had also
previously heard about Joseba’s many adventures. During the Spanish Civil War, for
example, Joseba saved the lives of the wife and six children of an uncle who worked for
the Republican government, by leading them across the French border. Decades later,
following the Cuban Revolution, Joseba helped his persecuted parishioners escape Cuba,
for which he was incarcerated and then deported. In La tribu atribulada Juaristi portrays
Joseba as a heroic figure who courageously acted against totalitarian forces. When he
finally had the chance to get to know Joseba in person, he admired his skepticism. Joseba
quarreled with the Francoist mayor of Barakaldo, yet when he later became acquainted
with exiled Republicans in Mexico, he found them similarly unconvincing. He was
punished for defying Castro’s government, yet was distrustful of the anti-Castro groups
formed by exiled Cubans in Miami. Most importantly, Joseba disliked both Basque
nationalist and leftist politics. Juaristi notes that while social Catholicism often slid
toward communism during Joseba’s time, Joseba’s critical thinking and independence
6 Juaristi makes lengthier reference to these conflicts at home in his autobiography
Cambio de destino. Memorias (2006), the subject of the second half of this chapter.
25
prevented him from confusing the two. He explains that Joseba was aware of the dangers
that leftist politics posed to the Church: “decía que las semejanzas superficiales del
marxismo con el cristianismo hacían de aquel un enemigo especialmente peligroso para
la Iglesia, quizá el peligro máximo con el que esta se había enfrentado a lo largo de su
historia” (32). Juaristi was impressed by Joseba’s identification with the Republican Party
of the United States as well as with the “ironía finísima” that he employed whenever he
conversed with the young, naive leftists who populated Juaristi’s social circle at that time.
Though not until after Joseba’s death, Juaristi eventually became disillusioned
with both nationalist and leftist politics, aligning himself with Joseba’s conservative
stance. In this spirit, the second half of La tribu atribulada is devoted to Juaristi’s
account of the failures of leftists in the Basque Country. Juaristi argues that
progressivism’s principal problem is its refusal to accept the established order: “Un
progre . . . nunca debe estar con el orden, con el sistema. Eso va en contra de la identidad
de la progresía. ¿Dónde se ha visto un progre que defienda lo existente?” (155). He
blames modern-day leftists’ inability to conform on their misguided obsession with the
myth of resistance. He then traces the history of the myth of resistance, identifying its
origins in France during the Second World War and explaining how it was then exported
to Spain, probably accompanied by the word maquis, which replaced guerrilla, an
autochthonous term that fell out of use among Spanish leftists until the Cuban Revolution
brought it back. Juaristi argues that Basque nationalists – who, unlike communists and
anarchists, mounted little, if any, resistance to Franco during the early years of the
dictatorship – later appropriated the resistance narrative and continue exploiting it today
by characterizing their political maneuvers as a resistance movement against an
oppressive Spanish State. According to Juaristi, nationalists’ appropriation of the
resistance myth dupes leftists into believing that they are fighting on the same side as
nationalists. In other words, it forces Basque leftists to constantly seek approval from the
PNV, the party which unduly gained a reputation for representing the highest standard of
26
resistance against Franco, while also forcing them to avoid collaboration with the PP
because they associate it with Franco. Progressives, then, are trapped into complying with
the nationalist mission, essentially making them “prisioneros del mito resistencial” (158).
Juaristi says he realized the impossibility of a leftist opposition to Basque nationalism in
September of 2000 on the eve of a demonstration organized by the anti-terrorist
organization ¡Basta Ya! and various terrorist victims’ groups. The day before the
demonstration, Juaristi had publicly declared it (in an article requested and published by
El País) a demonstration against Basque nationalism as a whole, not just ETA. This
argument was immediately rebutted by a number of public figures, including Felipe
González and Basque historian Antonio Elorza, who denounced Juaristi’s intransigence
and warned against an anti-nationalist sentiment overtaking the demonstration. Juaristi
was even more flabbergasted when he later found out that some of the organizers of the
event had been trying to convince the PNV to join them. At the end of the demonstration,
when he heard anti-francoist songs from his generation’s youth incongruously streaming
from the loudspeakers, Juaristi realized why his progressive companions had fallen
blindly into the nationalists’ trap: “creían seguir luchando contra el franquismo” (135).
Ahistorically fixed upon the maqui resistance three decades after the death of Franco, “. .
. el subconsciente de la izquierda sigue todavía en el monte” (160).
With this argument, Juaristi seeks to demonstrate the backwardness of
progressivism and its ineffectiveness in confronting the problems of modern-day Spain,
the greatest of which is the defense of the current democratic state. Juaristi explains that
today, “No estamos resistiendo contra ningún gobierno opresor, sino defendiendo el
orden democrático contra el terrorismo de ETA y el régimen nacionalista. Es decir,
defendiendo la democracia contra la Resistencia abertzale en sus dos versiones, terrorista
y gradualista” (191). The order that Juaristi defends is the Spanish State as it is defined
by the Constitution of 1978 and the 1979 Basque Statute of Autonomy. He justifies this
position by establishing that the nation-state is the best form of social organization thanks
27
to its democratic, unbiased nature, which promotes individual liberty and equality.
Juaristi establishes a clear division between the democratic nation-state and Basque
nationalists who attempt to undermine it (and the leftists who empower them to do so):
“Tenía que marcar de una vez la diferencia entre los partidarios de la Constitución y los
de la estrategia diseñada por ETA y apoyada por el PNV” (133). He marks the distinction
between the two by differentiating between patriotism and nationalism. For Juaristi, the
former is a positive trait of a healthy nation-state, while the latter is incompatible with
democracy. Quoting George Orwell, he states that patriotism is “por naturaleza
defensivo, cultural y militarmente,” while nationalism, in contrast, is “inseparable del
deseo de poder” and leads its adherents to “sumergir su propia individualidad” (Orwell
qtd. in 42). Because, unlike nationalism, patriotism acts in defense of the state, Juaristi
deems it “un sentimiento respetable y hasta necesario” (47). He adds, “Me siento un
patriota español y vasco, puesto que los patriotismos, al contrario que los nacionalismos,
pueden ser inclusivos y compatibles . . .” (42).
The guarantee of the inclusive and open nature of the nation-state, explains
Juaristi, is embodied in its constitution: “Pienso que la mayor ventaja de las NacionesEstado es que suelen recoger de forma más o menos explícita en sus constituciones o
leyes fundamentales el carácter contractual del vínculo nacional que une a sus
ciudadanos” (48). Juaristi bases his patriotism, then, upon the 1978 Constitution. He
draws a strict line between nacionalistas and constitucionalistas, the latter being the only
legitimate option (83).
In his adoption of constitutional patriotism for Spain, the notion popularized in
the 1980s by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas that a rational democratic citizenship
could replace ethnic-based nationalism as the unifying glue of the nation-state, Juaristi is
not alone. In the 1990s, after the projects of democratization, modernization and
Europeanization were well underway in Spain, the PSOE began to promote citizens’
shared loyalty to the 1978 Constitution as a means of sustaining national unity (Balfour
28
and Quiroga 90). And in the early 2000s, the PP appropriated the language of
constitutional patriotism as part of its shift toward regionalism (115). According to
Balfour and Quiroga, both the Spanish left and right – like Juaristi – employed
constitutional patriotism as an instrument to delegitimize Basque and Catalan
nationalisms by portraying them as comparatively “backwards” in their adherence to the
outdated nineteenth-century model of nationalism (91). This divisive strategy calls into
question Juaristi’s portrayal of constitutional patriotism as a neutral, all-inclusive,
unifying concept. Carrying out such questioning are André Lecours and Geneviève
Nootens, who aim to shed light on the dominant nationalisms that thrive under the
support of states and that, because of their neutral appearance, have been subject to
insufficient examination, unlike minority nationalisms, which have been the focus of
much study. In their introduction, they point out a double standard enjoyed by states with
regard to their accompanying dominant nationalisms: “Although states have claimed
international legitimacy on the grounds that they embody a nation, they have also denied
that they themselves articulate a nationalism, by pretending to be a neutral locus of
relationships between citizens” (12). According to the two scholars, many states deny
their nationalism by labeling it patriotism; as a result, patriotism is generally associated
with majorities, while such terms as nationalism and ethnicity are traditionally associated
with minorities, immigrants, and extremists. In La tribu atribulada Juaristi exploits this
interested distinction, insinuating that Spanish nationalism died altogether with Francoist
extremism and was replaced by benign constitutional patriotism in 1978. When he links
patriotism with democracy and asserts that nationalism and democracy are mutually
exclusive, Juaristi also assumes the neutrality of democracy, an assumption which
Lecours and Nootens call into question: because “ . . . liberal democracy is intertwined
with institutions and practices conveying and diffusing a view of the overarching identity
of citizens, an identity that makes them a people, whatever their other commitments . . . ,”
there is an . . . “assumption that everyone belongs indiscriminately to the demos, whereas
29
the demos is in fact related to an overarching national identity which is dominant or even
exclusive” (22). In the case of the Spanish right (and the left, to a lesser degree), the
dominant Spanish nationalism it promotes has remained present in its discourse. As
Balfour and Quiroga maintain, even since its nominal shift away from nationalism and
toward constitutional patriotism, the PP has not questioned the traditional narrative of
Spain’s cultural and historical legacy, defined as exclusively white, Castilian-speaking,
Christian, and imperial (116).7 Likewise, even in his endorsement of patriotism, Juaristi
in fact promotes a form of Spanish nationalism which attempts yet fails to satisfactorily
provide an overarching collective identity for all of Spain due to its exclusionary and
divisive nature.
Like Lecours and Nootens, Stephen Tierney, in a chapter called “Crystallizing
Dominance: Majority Nationalism, Constitutionalism and the Courts,” seeks to dismantle
the false dichotomy between nationalism and the nation-state and to demonstrate its
perniciousness, particularly in cases of plurinational states, where the majority
nationalism tends to dominate others. He argues that the cultural and societal dominance
of the majority group over others, which he refers to as “stateism,” is legitimized by
traditional liberal theory’s emphasis on the universality of the democratic state. Tierney
finds several problems with the universalism of liberal ethics. He explains that
universalism can disguise homogenization, that universalism can sometimes in fact be a
particularism of one of many cultures within a plurinational state, and that the state’s
establishment of universal standards based on individual equality within a polis can result
in opposition to group rights within a state. For example, the safeguarding of human
7 Juaristi’s contribution to the cultivation of symbols of Spanish national identity, such as
the lyrics that he recently composed to accompany Spain’s national anthem (an initiative of the
Fundación DENAES, para la defensa de la Nación Española, an organization that named him a
‘Patronato de Honor’), undermines his professed “non-nationalism.” The lyrics include a line
celebrating Spain’s imperial past: “Hora es de recordar / que alas de lino / te abrieron camino / de
un confín al otro lado del inmenso mar” (http://www.abc.es/espana/20121208/abci-himnonacional-letra-201212071912.html).
30
rights can be exploited as a way for the dominant nationalism to interfere with the
discretion of sub-state governments and legal systems. In La tribu atribulada, Juaristi
exploits this last tendency with a rhetorical maneuver when he swiftly dismisses a
group’s right of self-determination as “bodrio resistencial,” warning that its granting
leads to violations of individual human rights when that group wipes out its diversity: “La
autodeterminación suele llevar a la heteroexterminación” (188, 191). By portraying a
minority group’s demands as detrimental to the individuals within that group, Juaristi
justifies the subjugation of the minority group by a national majority that declares itself
the protector of individual rights. What’s more, in the same essay, Juaristi defends
precisely the “heteroexterminación” that he denounces among minority nationalisms, so
long as it occurs at the hands of a nation-state. Here he quotes American political
journalist Michael Lind: “Solamente la Nación-Estado permite el desarrollo de la
democracia moderna. Pero, para su estabilidad, la Nación-Estado debe aspirar a una
homogeneidad cultural y étnica. Las naciones multiétnicas están siempre amenazadas por
conflictos derivados de la rivalidad entre las etnias, que ponen en riesgo continuo las
bases contractuales de la democracia” (Lind qtd. in 43). For Juaristi, cultural and ethnic
homogenization is acceptable only if it is carried out by a state in favor of a dominant
national group and to the detriment of ever-threatening minority groups.
Tierney also contends that if traditional liberalism provides the theoretical
legitimization of the majority national group, then the constitution and those who
interpret it crystallize the majority group’s dominant position. Constitutions, according to
Tierney, represent the culture and values of the dominant nation in the state. When they
are presented as neutral documents, constitutions become a tool for the majority group to
entrench its cultural particularisms and thereby consolidate its dominance. Just as
important as the documents themselves are the constitutional processes, which include
both amendments to and interpretations of the text. Between the two opposing
approaches to interpreting a constitution – the “original intent” and the “living tree/living
31
instrument” approaches – Tierney favors the latter. He sharply criticizes narrow,
positivist approaches to constitutionalism, arguing that they overlook the complexity of
social relations within a state and fail to recognize that a constitution’s meaning, purpose,
and interpretations can vary within a state. In contrast to the more fluid, open-ended
approach to constitutionalism set forth by Tierney, the constitutional patriotism promoted
by the PP and the PSOE, argue Balfour and Quiroga, bestows upon the 1978 Constitution
a symbolic function that results in resistance to its alteration. Constitutional patriotism, in
this way, becomes an instrument to hinder the constitutional reforms demanded by substate nationalists (117). Juaristi’s variety of constitutional patriotism likewise fails to take
into account the subjective nature of any constitution. He presents his understanding of
the constitution’s meaning and purpose - a fixed set of laws which guarantees the eternal
unity of state - as universal, and his interpretation leaves no space for future amendments:
“Los fantasmas del pasado no tienen derechos, y los proyectos del futuro, tampoco”
(153). This singular emphasis on the present tense suggests that Juaristi views Spain’s
current political arrangement as immutable.
In “To be (a part) of a Whole: Constitutional Patriotism and the Paradox of
Democracy in the Wake of the Spanish Constitution of 1978” Brad Epps takes on
Spanish constitutional patriotism and its accompanying renunciation of the past and
future of Spain. While Epps does not doubt that the constitutional patriotism originally
promoted by Habermas serves in some countries as an alternative to ethnic-based
nationalism, he argues along similar lines to Balfour and Quiroga that Spain’s brand of
constitutional patriotism is merely an excuse used by the PP to drive forward a
“disavowed but still potent Spanish nationalist project” (547). He explains that this
“partisan, crypto-national appropriation of the concept” in Spain is in part due to the fact
that, unlike post-dictatorial Germany and Italy, Spain did not experience a power vacuum
upon the fall of Franco, because, in line with Franco’s orders, King Juan Carlos
immediately assumed power (557). Epps points out that while this historical moment is
32
always referred to as the transition to democracy, it was also in fact a restoration of
monarchy. He blames this restoration for not leaving the necessary space for a complete
overhaul of the political system and a true transformation of national sentiment into
abstract constitutional patriotism. He also blames the pacto del olvido, which, though
often cited as the key to the relative swiftness of Spain’s transition to democracy, also
prevents the “pitiless examination of the past” upon which Habermas’s conception of
constitutional patriotism depends (Thomas Harrington qtd. in 554). Epps points
specifically toward the PP as a group that wants to “have its national cake and eat it,
patriotically, too,” as it claims to uphold constitutional patriotism while simultaneously
refusing to confront its “deep historical and ideological ties to Francoism” (554). On
several occasions Juaristi dismisses the topic of Francoism as irrelevant to present-day
political discussion: “Y yo, que fui antifranquista cuando había que serlo, estoy hasta la
peineta del antifranquismo barato y cutre que hoy se estila, y no solo entre los
nacionalistas” (La tribu 100). Juaristi also denies any historical link between Francoism
and the PP, claiming that the latter has become a scapegoat for leftists’ and nationalists’,
who “necesitan de alguien que represente al franquismo mítico, y ese solo puede serlo el
PP, la derechona . . .” (158).
While Juaristi asserts that nationalists’ and leftists’ continued focus on Spain’s
dictatorial past makes them unenlightened and resistant to change, Epps argues that it is
in fact the constitutional patriots who reveal their recalcitrance in their opposition to
constitutional amendment. Epps notices that the two proclamations upon which the 1978
Constitution is founded: the permanence of the monarchy and the territorial
indissolubility of the nation-state, “set two powerful and mutually reinforcing limits on
reform,” to say nothing of Article 168 (on revision), which makes the constitution “all but
‘untouchable’” (547, 548). He argues that this insistence upon the territorial unity of
Spain ignores the fact that from one constitution to another, Spain’s territory changed, at
certain historical moments including parts of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Those who
33
call for an immutable constitution deny the fact that society and territory are in constant
flux. In light of Epps’s observations, Juaristi’s adamant defense of the status quo and
assertion of the permanence of a constitution which is not the first, and may not be the
last, in a line of many, are misguided and misleading. Epps adds that the PP’s version of
constitutional patriotism (to which Juaristi’s version aligns) hinders not only
constitutional reform and critical examination of the past, but also the debate, discussion,
consent, and dissent that are central to the democracy that they claim to defend. Spanish
constitutional patriotism’s resistance to potential future change leads to permanent
gridlock between those defending the status quo and those who feel marginalized within
it. Therefore, critical assessment of the purportedly neutral, inclusive, and democratic
order defended by Juaristi in La tribu atribulada reveals that it in fact serves to
permanently exclude minority groups from public debate by denying both their past
grievances and future projects.
The Law of the Spanish Father and the Basque Maternal
Real
Though it goes unmentioned by the scholars cited above, the modern liberal
nation-state is exclusive not only culturally, but also as it relates to gender. Just as the
dominant nationalism in multi-national states often go unnoticed, until recently, men and
masculinity have been virtually invisible, being considered neutral or genderless. It is not
surprising, then, that the state’s purportedly neutral constitutions and institutional
structures maintain not only the dominance of the state’s majority culture, but also that of
patriarchy. One way that this happens is by holding in highest esteem certain traits which
sustain traditional definitions of masculinity and portraying them as gender-neutral. One
unquestionably gendered attribute extolled in La tribu atribulada is courage. Uncle
Joseba, yet again representing the ideal against which other male figures are compared,
was undeniably courageous. He led family members across French border with German
34
bombers overhead and risked his life to save Cuban parishioners who were persecuted by
revolutionaries. Along with Joseba, Juaristi describes another courageous Basque cleric:
Teodoro Zuazúa, a bishop from the Biscayan town of Ermua who publicly demanded the
release of Miguel Ángel Blanco, the young PP city councilor who was kidnapped and
murdered by ETA in July 1997. Juaristi recalls seeing an enraged Zuazúa on television
during the dreadful hours between the kidnapping and the shooting, demanding, with fists
raised, “¡A este que yo bauticé no le matéis!” and marking the difference between “la ira
desgarrada del buen pastor y la impostada compunción del funcionario eclesiástico” (La
tribu 85-6). Juaristi sets Zuazúa’s unselfconscious expression of ire in opposition to the
cowardice of two other Basque bishops. The first is Ricardo Blázquez, bishop of the
Juaristi family’s church in Bilbao. According to Juaristi, when Blázquez’s upcoming
transfer from the diocese of Palencia to Bilbao was announced, Basque nationalist
politicians, in particular former PNV leader Xabier Arzalluz, spoke out against him,
claiming that with his transfer the Opus Dei was imposing its will upon the Basque
people. Before the move, Blázquez openly defended himself against Arzalluz’s
comments. However, according to Juaristi, Blázquez’s courage dissipated once he arrived
to the Basque Country: “. . . el encuentro con su nueva sede debió de angustiarle mucho
más de lo que habría podido prever” (93). Nationalists, angry that the bishop “se había
atrevido a regañar al buenazo de Xabier,” threatened to boycott the bishop, who “sintió
pavor ante lo que amenaza convertirse en un cisma alentado por los burukides [PNV
members]” and backed down, going as far as to announce that he would make an effort to
learn Basque (93). At that point, the “avezado perdonavidas” Arzalluz and company, with
the knowledge that the bishop was “dispuesto a pasar por las que le pusieran en el
futuro,” did indeed stop harassing him (94). However, in Juaristi’s view, the price that the
humiliated Blázquez paid in order to avoid conflict with nationalists was too great; he
allowed himself to be gobbled up by the local system and lose his own voice: “La red de
consejos presbiteriales, laicales y mediopensionistas que constituyen la organización
35
diocesana de Vizcaya se tragó al Obispo, como el Gargantúa de las fiestas de Bilbao,
permitiéndole parecer sólo cuando había que leer comunicados de interés colectivo” (94).
Juaristi admits that Ricardo Blázquez, though he proved a weak leader, is still
“una persona excelente, además de un católico sincero” (93). He has a much more
negative view of Jacinto Setién, a retired bishop and professor at the Universidad
Pontificia of Salamanca and supporter of Basque self-determination, whom Juaristi calls
“un intelectual dubitativo y escurridizo” (89). Juaristi’s negative view of Setién comes in
part from the bishop’s bias against the PP. When some members of that party reproached
such favoritism, Setién’s response was, according to Juaristi, “¿Dónde está escrito que un
padre deba querer por igual a todos sus hijos?’” (90). Yet what bothers Juaristi is not so
much his unfair treatment of his “sons” as his silence when it comes to those killed,
kidnapped, and threatened by ETA. He criticizes Setién for not publicly standing up for
the victims: “¿Alguien recuerda que Setién haya dado la cara alguna vez? Nunca. Por
nadie. Ni por él mismo,” and places him in contrast to the brave Joseba and Zuazúa: “Dar
la cara es lo que hizo Joseba en Cuba. . . . Dar la cara es lo que hizo don Teodoro Zuazúa
aquel 10 de julio de 1997 en Ermua” (91). In his attack on Setién’s character, Juaristi’s
pairing of Setién’s quote about his unequal love for his sons with a demonstration of his
lack of courage reveals that for Juaristi, courage and fatherhood go hand in hand.
At this point a pattern can be detected; Juaristi only has a problem with those
bishops who sympathize with Basque nationalism. He makes it clear that, although he is
critical of Blázquez and Setién, in general, “. . . nunca he sentido la necesidad de
meterme con los obispos. Ni de jalearles, claro. No encontrarás, en todo lo que he escrito
sobre el País Vasco, crítica alguna de un obispo” (89). His tolerance of bishops and
criticism of Basque nationalist priests is in line with his rejection of the beliefs instilled in
him throughout his upbringing. Juaristi devotes his 1999 essay Sacra Némesis: nuevas
historias de nacionalistas vascos to the intersection of Christianity and Basque
nationalism. In this book he notes the peculiar nature of his father’s generation of
36
nationalists’ relationship to the Catholic institutions of 1950s Bilbao. He describes his
father’s group of friends as “unos católicos raros: militantes de Acción Católica,
miembros de la Adoración Nocturna, activísimos participantes en todo proyecto
parroquial, andaban siempre conchabados con los curas, pero mantenían hacia los
obispos una actitud cordialmente hostil. No recuerdo que en mi casa se haya hablado
nunca bien de un obispo” (Sacra 34). The reason for this different treatment of bishops
and priests by Basque nationalists is clear: “Los obispos formaban parte del bando
vencedor. . . . los obispos los nombraba Franco. Los curas eran otra cosa, gente nuestra,
nacionalistas o criptonacionalistas muchos de ellos” (34). Juaristi points out that in spite
of nationalists’ rejection of National Catholicism via their chilly relationship with
Franco-appointed bishops behind the backs of whom they schemed with homegrown
nationalist priests, Catholicism still managed to permeate Basque culture, from its
festivals to everyday life. In reality, says Juaristi, there was little difference between the
religiosity of the winners and that of the losers of the Civil War (35). This is because the
losers, or the nationalists of his father’s generation, instead of rejecting Franco’s
nationalization of Catholicism, created their own version: “Al nacionalcatolicismo del
régimen opusieron un catolicismo nacionalista propio8” (48). Juaristi calls the Basque
brand of nationalist Catholicism etnocristianismo, a concept which he defines in Sacra
Némesis as “la transferencia de sacralidad . . . de la religión de Cristo a la religión de la
Nación,” or “la nacionalización del catolicismo” (36, 29). Because Basque nationalist
discourse could not be expressed explicitly under the Francoist dictatorship, it drew upon
religious, specifically Christian, language and metaphors (100). Basque ethnochristianity,
8 Here Juaristi implicitly likens Francoist and Basque uses of Christianity in nationalist
projects. Juaristi more explicitly associates Basque nationalism with twentieth-century
totalitarianisms in Auto de terminación (1994), on which he collaborated with Juan Aranzadi and
Patxo Unzueta; in his contribution to José Varela Ortega’s Contra la violencia. A propósito del
nacional-socialismo alemán y del vasco (2001); and in his first and only novel La caza salvaje
(2007).
37
according to Juaristi, included, for example, the transfer of sacredness onto national
territory; the appropriation of Christian symbols for nationalist purposes, such as
Anthony of Padua, the saint of lost objects frequently invoked by Basque nationalists in
search of their lost nation; and the martyrdom of ETA militants.
This third characteristic of etnocristianismo – the martyrdom of ETA militants –
is especially important, because, according to Juaristi, the 1968 death and subsequent
glorification of Marxist etarra Javier “Txabi” Etxebarrieta Ortiz marks the completion of
the transfer of sacredness from the Church to the Basque nation, or in other words, the
moment at which Basque nationalism becomes a religion. Prior to Etxebarrieta, observes
Juaristi, Basque nationalism lacked heroic figures. Upon losing the Civil War, Catholic
nationalists, who belonged to a culture “carente de mitos heroicos” justified their side’s
lack of military success by identifying with martyrdom, or what Juaristi calls the “total
identificación del nacionalismo derrotado con la Iglesia sufriente” (47). They excused
themselves from their lack of heroism by claiming to sacrifice themselves in order to
avoid causing bloodshed: “La derrota militar fue, por tanto, dignificada por un tópico que
se instaló en la cultura nacionalista (o, más bien, abertzale-católica) de los años cuarenta
y cincuenta: el de un pueblo que había preferido padecer la injusticia a mancharse con
sangre ajena” (47). The formation of ETA in 1959 changed this. In June of 1968 the
Guardia Civil shot Etxebarrieta dead during his arrest for killing their fellow patrolman
José Antonio Pardines. Etxebarrieta and his story were romanticized, converting him into
a Basque nationalist hero. Yet Juaristi is quick to point out that there is nothing heroic
about the act of violence committed by Etxebarrieta. Though it is often recounted by
abertzale sources as an assassination committed in the name of the patria, Juaristi,
relying on the testimony of Iñaki Sarasqueta, a former etarra present during the events
leading up to Etxebarrieta’s death, sets the record straight in Sacra Némesis. He reveals
Etxebarrieta as a young man, who, under the influence of amphetamines and a misguided
revolutionary ideology, shot a police officer whose back was turned, and later, due to his
38
guilty conscience, deliberately allowed himself to be caught by police. In this way,
Juaristi exposes Etxebarrieta, upheld by etarras as a leftist nationalist hero, as a
cowardly, repentant boy: a “buen chico bilbaíno” (127).
In La tribu atribulada, the figure with whom Juaristi represents “el
etnocristianismo flagrante” is Ander, “el cura nacionalista” who in the essay acts as a foil
to Uncle Joseba, “el cura liberal” (75, 37). Ander was Juaristi’s father’s religious mentor,
and therefore, unlike Joseba, substantially affected his worldview. Even though Juaristi
acknowledges that Ander was a moderate nationalist in that he did not support ETA, he
still asserts that the influence Ander wielded over his father’s thinking was pernicious.
Yet rather than resent or blame Ander, Juaristi patronizes him. Echoing his portrayal of
Javier Etxebarrieta in Sacra Némesis, Juaristi depicts Ander as an ingenuous boy, with
expressions like “un pedazo de pan,” “Pobre Ander,” and “sonrisa de niño grande” (8081). And he describes Ander’s faith as “la fe ingenua y segura de la infancia,” which is
“exenta de intelectualismo” (78, 23). Simple-minded Ander, for example, made the
mistake of distinguishing between Spanish and Basque Catholicisms, understanding the
former as “una religión de conquista e intolerancia, una religión militar forjada en la
guerra contra el moro,” and the latter as “dulce, tierno, maternal, con la Virgen Madre . . .
como figura central” (76). Juaristi explains that Ander’s identification with a
maternalistic Basque Church stems from the priest’s having lost his mother at an early
age; he diagnoses him with “el síndrome de la madre muerta” (78). Because Ander’s
mother died soon before he entered seminary, Juaristi suggests that he “debió de
transferir pronto a la Iglesia el fantasma de su madre desaparecida,” so that for him the
Church became an “inmenso cuerpo materno” in replacement of his late mother (78). His
inability to break free of the melancholy caused by his lost mother prevented Ander from
achieving adult mentality and intellect. Juaristi, after citing a passage in Corinthians
about the need for maturity (“al hacerme hombre, dejé todas las cosas de niño”), explains
that Ander feared growing up because it meant separating from his mother and entering
39
the realm of the father: “Ander tenía tanto miedo a crecer como a ver crecer a los demás.
Porque crecer es separarse de la Madre – en mi caso, de la Santa Madre Iglesia – y pasar
del amor a la ley; esto es, a la Ley del Padre” (78-9).
Though Juaristi does not openly cite Lacan as a source, the core argument of La
tribu atribulada is a derivation of his theory of the Name of the Father, which states that
individuation occurs when a child is separated from the mother, who pertains to the realm
of the Imaginary, and enters the Symbolic Order of the father. Juaristi asserts that in order
to mature properly, a child must eventually be detached from the love provided by the
mother and inserted in the authoritative structure that the father provides, and “. . . debe
quedar asimismo claro que el Padre se atendrá a lo establecido en la Ley” (15). In her
interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, Deborah Luepnitz asserts that for
Lacan all human nostalgia, religion, belief, and political utopias stem from the pain of our
having to leave the sein, which in French (and also in Spanish: seno) means both “breast”
and “womb” (223). In La tribu atribulada, Juaristi applies this notion to Basque leftists
and nationalists who refuse to comply with the laws of the Spanish Constitution; he
argues that they reject the law because they remain trapped in the maternal space and
refuse to comply to the Law of the Father. Citing psychoanalyst and ex-etarra Iñaki Viar,
Juaristi states that “lo característico de la izquierda de nuestra generación es el horror a
cualquier orden simbólico. La izquierda, explica Iñaki, al reaccionar contra la Ley del
Padre (y, por tanto, contra toda ley), no pudo comprender la necesidad del orden y, sobre
todo, la necesidad de los símbolos” (160). Juaristi’s and Viar’s generation of Basque
leftists and nationalists was not the first to fail to enter the Symbolic Order. Juaristi
explains that his father’s generation, because the Civil War interrupted its members’
upbringing, was deprived of male authority figures, resulting in its rebelliousness:
“Privados de la Ley del Padre, los niños, precozmente convertidos en adolescentes,
improvisan sus propios sistemas . . . Y los hacen del único modo que saben hacerlo:
jugando. Generalmente, jugando a la guerra” (11). And these war games eventually led to
40
real violent rebellion against the State. Juaristi therefore suggests that it was a lack of a
patriarchal structure which brought about terrorism in the Basque Country. He adds that
his father’s generation of Basque nationalism is not based upon laws, but rather on “el
odio a la Ley del Otro” (13).
Juaristi refers to Basque nationalism as a “tribu” for its lack of a legal structure;
instead of establishing institutions, it consists of illegitimate “contrainstituciones.”
According to Juaristi, the tragedy of his father’s and his own generations is that, in the
absence of the Law of the Father, they reached out for a simulacrum of law offered by the
nationalist tribe (12-13). His use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in his understanding of
leftist and nationalist politics reveals that Juaristi equates the legitimacy of the
Constitution with patriarchal authority and diagnoses the subversion of or failure to
identify with such authority as pathological. This is why Juaristi praises overall the
Church’s role in stabilizing Spanish society while criticizing the Basque priests and
bishops who refused to insert themselves within the larger hierarchy of the Church by
fully conforming to its political ideology. Like the leftists who incessantly reject the
status quo, local Basque priests step outside their boundaries when they question the
integrity of the Spanish State or accommodate non-Spanish national identities, and in
both cases the legitimate structures of power are perverted.
From Juaristi’s perspective, this perversion of authority in the Basque Country
takes the form of a deficiency of masculinity. Nationalism and progressivism plague
institutions with non-masculine traits, one of which is cowardice, as can been seen in the
examples of Bishop Ricardo Blázquez’s crumbling under abertzale pressure or Javier
Extebarrieta’s having shot a man in the back. In addition to cowardly, Juaristi contends
that leftists and nationalists, due to their resistance to leaving the safety of the maternal
space and entering the Symbolic Order, are overly dependent. Throughout his oeuvre,
Juaristi lauds individualism, fancying himself as a free-thinking individual who refuses to
41
permanently align himself with any political ideology.9 His Uncle Joseba, who is
established as the exemplary male figure in La tribu atribulada, is similarly depicted, as
he could be persuaded to join neither Francoists nor Spanish Republicans, neither Castro
nor anti-Castro groups. Basque nationalism, says Juaristi, lacks this kind of “caballo
salvaje que se aparta de la manada” (145). (The only one it could once claim, Gabriel
Mora Zabala, foresaw what would come of the Basque Country when abertzalismo took
over, and, in true maverick form, switched sides (145).) Instead, as Juaristi states near the
end of Sacra Némesis, the Basque Country has become, with the exception of a few nonnationalist outliers, many of whom have fled to other parts of Spain, “una comunidad
nacionalista que comparte, hoy más que nunca, unos mismos objetivos, una misma
ideología y, al menos, unas mismas fobias culturales,” (Sacra 270). Prior to the abertzale
takeover and Juarist’s departure from Bilbao, there still existed “la posibilidad de disentir
y de increpar” as well as plenty of Basques who were “reacios a toda normalización”
(305). However, what prevails in the Basque Country today is “la norma primera de todo
conformismo” (304). And all nationalists had to do to eliminate the courageous
nonconformists from Basque politics was “descerebrar a un par de generaciones” (La
tribu 83).
Demonstrating the importance of individualism for Juaristi is the fact that his
single cause for complaint about the historically heavy clerical presence in Spain (besides
the way it was appropriated for etnocristianismo in the Basque Country, of course) is that
it has slowed down liberalization by inhibiting individual initiative (96). The liberal ideal
of individualism, as Michael Kimmel points out, is not a gender-neutral attribute.
9 Indeed, Juaristi’s present-day identity as a minority constitutional patriot, as is widely
known, is only the latest of his many reincarnations; he has favored a variety of ideological
positions throughout his evolution from Basque nationalist to anti-Basque nationalist and from
trotskyist to appointee to institutional positions by the conservative Partido Popular. In between
he affiliated himself with the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and later the Basque Socialist
Party (PSE). As he describes it, “Fui sucesivamente aranista, nacionalista democrático,
nacionalista revolucionario, trotskista, eurocomunista y socialdemócrata . . .” (Sacra 268-9).
42
Kimmel explains that the institutional arrangements of today’s global society (the
marketplace, multinational corporations and transnational geopolitical institutions) and
the ideological principles which sustain them, such as liberal individualism, appear to be
gender-neutral, though they are not. Quoting Robert Connell, Kimmel notes that while
“the language of globalization remains gender neutral . . . the ‘individual’ of neoliberal
theory has in general the attributes and interests of a male entrepreneur’” (415).
Meanwhile, Michele Adams and Scott Coltrane analyze the ambivalent connection that
men and boys often have to families in comparison to women and girls. They point out
that while feminine ideals generally enmesh girls within the family, masculine ideals
project boys out of and away from the family, since masculinity is for the most part
defined outside of the domestic space, in occupational organizations, sports teams,
fraternities, or the military, for example (230-2). These sex-stratified realms, which offer
“male bonding and solidification of the collective practice of masculinity,” also include
“rituals that involve strengthening masculine ideals and notions of entitlement, already
internalized at a personal level, at an abstract level that makes them appear to be, more
than ever, part of the ‘natural gender order’” (238). For the most part in Western cultures,
the masculine ideal of independence is privileged over connection, because “the
collective practice of masculinity serves, both directly and indirectly, the interests of the
state (and its corporate arm), which needs men who are aggressive, prone to violence,
unemotional, patriotic, competitive, and somewhat distanced from family” (232, 239). As
Juaristi demonstrates, non-confrontational Blázquez, brainwashed and guilt-ridden
Etxebarrieta, and child-like Ander fail to meet the standards of masculinity that
accommodate economic liberalism and uphold the power of the State.
If the privileged ideals of masculinity are constituted in the public sphere, then it
is not surprising that Juaristi would disdain the space of the family, as he does, for
example, when he disparages Ander’s connection to his mother. By describing it with the
metaphors of a tribe and a womb, and by associating it with his childhood, Juaristi likens
43
the Basque Country as it has been shaped by nationalism to a family, in contrast to a body
of citizens, the latter status being achieved only through compliance with the Constitution
and Statute of Autonomy, or acceptance of its position as a region within an overarching
state. Through this portrayal, Juaristi seeks to delegitimize the present-day Basque
Country as a political entity by positioning it outside the boundaries of the masculine,
public space of political discourse. By restricting it to the domestic realm and thereby
feminizing it, Juaristi also converts the Basque Country into an Other. Another example
of Juaristi’s sexual othering of the Basque Country can be found in his autobiography
Cambio de destino, in which Juaristi muses about the Basques’ especial affection toward
Saint Agatha, and jokingly theorizes that for Basque men, who are sexually listless
“mama’s boys” (“sexualmente desganado(s)”, “enmadrados y tímidos” (Cambio 77)) the
cutting off of the maternal figure’s breasts desexualizes her, permitting them to
“perpetuarse en el estadio oral, sublimando sus pulsiones en la comensalidad
exclusivamente masculina” (77). Hence, underlying the fondness that the Basque
“mamones perpetuos” express for Saint Agatha is a potential “homosexualidad latente de
los chicarrones del norte . . .” (77). After portraying Basque men collectively as
homosexual, sexually passive and lacking in virility, Juaristi is quick to distinguish
himself from them: “Mi rechazo de la leche maternal – fui nutrido exclusivamente con
pelargón – anunciaba ya mi futuro distanciamiento de la tribu” (77). Juaristi defines his
own traditionally acceptable form of masculinity against that which is Other to it: Basque
men.
Saint Agatha is not the only maternal figure to whom Basque nationalists
collectively cling. According to Juaristi’s Sacra Némesis, a statue in Bilbao of Our Lady
of Begoña, the patron saint of the Biscayan province, played an important role in
etnocristianismo. Juaristi contends that Begoña was appropriated as a nationalist symbol
during the transfer of sacredness from the Church to the nation, returning to a solely
religious function only after the transfer was complete. Juaristi explains that throughout
44
the post-war resurgence of Basque nationalism, Begoña served as a “refugio de la
sentimentalidad patriótica” (Sacra 100). Yet Begoña also had a dark side. Juaristi, linking
Begoña to generations of political violence, claims that compared to her, “. . . pocas
imágenes marianas habrán concitado a su alrededor tanta violencia . . .” (58). After all,
she played a starring role in the battles for Bilbao during the Carlist Wars and the Civil
War, in the squirmishes between medieval Biscayan clans, in the countless bloody riots
stemming from economic and political disputes between Bilbao’s townspeople and
Begoña’s rural peasants from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and in the
emergence of present-day nationalist terrorism. In case that were insufficient to prove
Begoña’s ominous nature, Juaristi recounts her invariable presence at funerals, revealing
her intimate connection to death: “Desde hace muchas generaciones, a los míos se les
bautiza en dicho templo y mueren bajo el manto de la Virgen” (55), and later, “El manto
de la Virgen de Begoña, ¿no es acaso un objeto terrible? Su entrada solemne en la casa
familiar anuncia el inminente paso del ángel exterminador” (58). In her study of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, Luepnitz notes that, according on Lacan, while we long for the maternal
space of the Real – that which is anterior to not only symbolic representation, but also the
imaginary, and which therefore eludes us entirely – the Real also has an “abominable
aspect” (224). It is this abominable aspect of the maternal Begoña to which Juaristi refers
when he calls her an “icono de dulzura terrible” (Sacra 56). Juaristi’s fear of the terrible
mother extends beyond the specific figure of Begoña. In another chapter of Sacra
Némesis he discusses a treacherous mountain ridge in Biscay called Infernuko Zubia
(Hell’s Bridge), which he traversed during his adolescence as a rite of passage for joining
the Basque nationalist “tribe”. He then maintains that adhering to nationalism during
adulthood is like attempting to cross back over to the other side of Hell’s Bridge and
return to “La Infancia silenciosa, anterior a la lengua, anterior a la ley” (51). After
drawing a parallel between a man’s crossing back over the bridge and his reentering “el
vientre de su madre,” Juaristi warns that such a path “nos llevaría hasta el infierno,” thus
45
equating the feminine with perdition (51). Inasmuch as the non-masculine Other exists
within the Real, and is therefore impossible to integrate in an order of representation, it
presents a constant danger.
In an article on neoliberal ideology in autobiographies by Basque intellectuals
(including La tribu atribulada) Joseba Gabilondo maps out the nation-building process
through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He contends that while the state represents
the Symbolic Order (it makes its presence known through myriad disjointed symbols),
and the citizens the Imaginary Order (they see themselves reflected in and eventually
identify with those fragmented representations of the “national mirror”), the Real harbors
that which resists absorption into the state. The state dejects such resistant matter because
it is either historically dangerous, in that it belongs to older forms of power (nobility,
tribal authorities, religion), or subaltern (witch doctors, superstition, the rural world). Yet,
in spite of being dejected, this matter constantly subverts the state by threatening to
reappear through violence. Citing Judith Butler, Gabilondo goes on to explain that the
state constitutes itself and establishes what qualifies as “being” not only by reiterating
itself through symbols, but also through exclusion of the subaltern. But rather than
disappear, that which is excluded haunts the state from the margins (“The State’s body”
191-3). Kimmel, also exploring the process through which the hegemonic and subaltern
emerge simultaneously, adds that this process is gendered. He notes that just as cities are
built in conjunction with the creation of peripheries, the hegemonic masculine ideal was
created against a screen of Others whose masculinity was problematized and devalued.
Citing globalization as an example, Kimmel explains that along with globalization
emerges a global hegemonic masculinity, which leads to increased “gendering” of local,
regional, and national resistance to incorporation into the global arena as subordinate
identities (415-416). For Juaristi, the Basque Country embodies the dangerous, feminine
Other against which the Spanish State is defined, and its disturbing, traumatizing force
makes itself present throughout his work.
46
Juaristi argues that while the Real, or subaltern, is always present, it must be
vigilantly repressed, and it is the responsibility of the paternal state authority to maintain
control over those Others which threaten its integrity. For example, the patriarchal
authority of the state, pertaining to the Symbolic Order, must assume control over
symbols such as flags. On the one hand, the Basque flag (the ikurriña), as Juaristi
implies, symbolizes the threat of disorder: “En el ochenta por ciento de los casos en que
veas a un tipo junto a una ikurriña, ten por seguro que se trata de un gamberro, cuando no
de algo peor” (La tribu 168). This is because, according to Juaristi, the ikurriña, when it
stands alone, represents resistance to the state, while the Spanish flag, on the other hand,
represents the Constitution, democracy, and freedom10. When the ikurriña is
accompanied by the Spanish flag, its symbolism is appropriated by the state, which
reduces its status from that of a national symbol to that of the symbol of the 1979 Basque
Statute of Autonomy, and the threat it poses to the state is diminished: “Cuando en las
manifestaciones convocadas por los movimientos cívicos vea ondear a la bandera
nacional junto a la ikurriña, quizás esta me preocupe un poco menos” (193). In other
words, the paternal presence of the Spanish flag keeps the tempestuous Basque child in
line.
Furthermore, when the Basque gamberro refuses to behave in recognition of the
Law of the Father, the father – or the state – must be willing to employ violence, a point
that Juaristi makes by recounting a story by the Italian humorist Giovanni Guareschi
(1908-1968), starring his two popular characters, the priest Don Camilo and the farcical
communist mayor Peppone. In the anecdote cited by Juaristi, Peppone asks Camilo to
baptize his son with the name “Lenin Libre Antonio.” After Camilo dismisses the
10 Exemplified by the ongoing battle between the Spanish government and nationalistcontrolled Basque town councils over the latter’s noncompliance with legislation requiring the
Spanish flag’s presence alongside the ikurriña, resistance to the Spanish flag and its association
with Francoism, especially, but not only, in the Basque Country and Catalonia, signals Spain’s
shortcomings in building national consciousness at the symbolic level (Balfour and Quiroga 144).
47
request, an enraged Peppone, under pressure from his wife, returns to demand that
Camilo baptize the baby boy. In response to Peppone’s hysterics, Camilo knocks the
mayor out (“De un gancho, el cura noquea al alcalde.”) (193). This subdues Peppone,
who sulkily brings his son to the church, agreeing to have him baptized as “Camilo Lenin
Libre Antonio.” The pleased priest remarks, “Con un Camilo cerca, no hay por qué
preocuparse de los otros” (Guareschi qtd. in 193). Here Camilo, representing a paternal
presence alongside the outlandishly extremist Peppone, demonstrates his position in the
Symbolic Order when he asserts his power to name Peppone’s son. When Peppone
initially fails to recognize Camilo’s authority, Camilo rightfully (from Juaristi’s
perspective) resorts to physical violence.
Likewise, Juaristi argues, the Spanish State must approach the Basque Country’s
deviant behavior with violence. Kimmel reminds us that patriarchy consists not only of
men dominating women, but also men dominating other men in lesser positions of power.
He distinguishes between public patriarchy (the predominance of males and masculine
values in political and economic institutional of a society) and domestic patriarchy (the
reproduction of male privilege at the private, emotional and familial levels of a society),
while stressing that both are held together by the threat of violence (417). The threat of
violence is likewise the glue which holds together the state (through military endeavors),
making the state’s monopoly of violence so important. Juaristi argues that only the
nation-state, with its monopoly of legitimate violence, can suppress the danger of anarchy
or tyranny (Sacra 43, 183). For this reason, he urges the state to act against threats to its
authority using “todos los medios legales a su alcance” and praises, for example,
American military endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan for their “misión civilizadora” of
forming and reinforcing democratic nation-states (191). Patriarchy’s and the state’s
mutual employment of the threat of violence signals the deep-seated connection between
the two. Paul Higate and John Hopton discuss this reciprocal relationship between
militarism and masculinity, explaining that the state benefits from upholding masculine
48
ideals, such as stoicism, competitiveness, and the domination of weaker individuals, in
order to gain support for the use of violence by the state (433-4). Meanwhile, militarism
feeds into the ideologies of masculinity, for the military, more than anywhere else, is
where “the ideologies of hegemonic masculinity are institutionalized and eroticized”
(436).
Because violence is essential to the maintenance of both patriarchy and the state,
it follows that qualities such as courage and aggression be encouraged in boys and men,
so long as the interests of the state are served. For example, Juaristi fondly remembers the
military propaganda in the monthly issues of American Boy Scouts magazine Boys’ Life
that his uncle Joseba would send him from Miami during the Vietnam War:
He lamentado muchas veces no haber guardado los números de
esta [Boy’s Life] que recibí puntualmente durante varios años. Eran
los primeros de la Guerra de Vietnam, y sus páginas rezumaban
belicismo: llamadas al alistamiento, cartas escritas desde la zona de
combate por antiguos scouts e historias increíbles de soldados que
resolvían situaciones difíciles mediante destrezas adquiridas en sus
tiempos de exploradores. (La tribu 29)
As the explicit recruitment efforts in Boy’s Life make apparent, male-exclusive
organizations like the Boy Scouts, with their uniforms and hierarchical structures, reflect
and promote military culture (Higate and Hopton 434). While Juaristi praises the
cultivation of future soldiers by the Boy Scouts of America, he accuses the scout
organization in the Basque Country of being a “gran cantera de ETA,” and blames his
entrance into ETA at least partially on his participation in the Scout movement (La tribu
118). It seems that, in Juaristi’ mind, the Scout organization serves as yet another
example, along with the Church, of the corruption of an institution of masculine
indoctrination within the Basque context. The Scouts’ mission to propagate a form of
masculinity that feeds into and perpetuates violent conflicts is acceptable for Juaristi, so
long as that violence is state-sponsored. Yet Juaristi goes beyond merely promoting the
state’s use of its monopoly of violence in response to Basque separatism; he rebukes
peaceful approaches to the conflict. As Juaristi demonstrated in his criticism of Bishop
49
Blázquez’s eventually making concessions to Basque nationalists, cooperation with them
equates a lack of courage. Yet refusing to collaborate with nationalists is insufficient;
peaceful protests against nationalist extremism, led mostly by progressive groups, are
also cowardly. Juan Aranzadi, professor of anthropology and collaborator with Juaristi in
Auto de terminación (1994), promotes pacifism in his 2001 book El escudo de Arquíloco,
in which he elaborates an “ética para fugitivos.” Juaristi, disappointed in his former
friend’s turn toward pacifism, calls him an “apologista de la deserción” and contends that
Aranzadi’s endorsement for escaping violence “No hace el elogio de la huida espacial o
táctica, sino la defensa de la cobardía que no se mueve de su sitio. Hace el elogio del
conformismo, de la resignación, y el silencio. Predica la aceptación de la derrota” (111,
129). If progressive and moderate nationalist parties in the Basque Country show
themselves to be “cowards” in their pacifist resistance to ETA, then it follows for Juaristi
that the conservative PP, which has always been an aggressive defender of Spanish
citizens against ETA, is the only viable political party in the Basque Country (192).
Juaristi’s rejection of femininity and non-normative masculinity coincides with his
inability to conceive of non-violent approaches to the discord between national identities
in Spain.
Autobiography and Juaristi as Father
While descriptions and analyses of Joseba, Ander, and other father figures fill the
pages of La tribu atribulada, it is the constant presence of Juaristi’s own father between
the lines which is most important. As the second half of its title indicates, the book’s
addressee is Juaristi’s estranged father. In the preface, Juaristi expresses that his purpose
for writing the book is to explain to his father how Basque nationalism tore them apart:
Es tarde para todo lo que no sea explicarte por qué nos
alejamos. . . . Hablaré . . . de ti y de mí, de una historia compartida
que, desde el principio, no cesó de poner distancia entre ambos.
Debo explicarte por qué las cosas salieron así, y debo
explicártelo pronto.
50
Antes de que caiga la noche. (16)
This deeply personal address to his father signals a departure from his earlier scholarly
publications, even if La tribu atribulada’s purpose – to dismantle the myths upholding
Basque nationalism – is the same. Unlike his previous publications, La tribu atribulada
contains no references, citations, nor an index. Instead of assuming the role of an ideally
objective scholar, Juaristi bases his arguments in La tribu atribulada on his personal
experiences and acquaintances. This book, while including elements of academic,
epistolary and biographical writing, marks a notable shift toward the autobiographical
genre, a shift which later culminates with his autobiography Cambio de destino (2006).
One function of the autobiographical character of La tribu atribulada, besides
providing Juaristi an additional layer of expertise on the workings of Basque nationalism
(he has “been there, done that”), is that it establishes the basis for his Law of the Father
argument. In other words, Juaristi uses his dysfunctional relationship with his father to
demonstrate how the lack of order in Basque society extends to and is reproduced at the
level of the individual family. He does so by portraying his father as an incompetent
authority figure, who, rather than establishing and enforcing definitive laws, insists upon
breaking the rules:
Siempre el mismo: romper las reglas acordadas. Hacer trampas . . .
ostentosas y desafiantes, provocación pura que solo perseguía
irritar al contrincante y darte así un pretexto para interrumpir el
juego. . . . La casa se llenaba de juegos de mesa: ajedrez, damas,
parchís, oca, scramble, barajas, dados…, pero ¿cuántas partidas
iniciadas terminamos? Tú cambiabas las reglas sobre la marcha, y
a la primera protesta derribabas las piezas o volcabas el tablero.
(15)
According to Juaristi, the unfair tactics his father employed while playing board games
are symptomatic of a culture of lawlessness – even nihilism – that led to the very serious
consequence of terrorism (14). Juaristi blames his generation’s fall into terrorism on their
fathers: “Te preguntas, viajero, por qué hemos muerto jóvenes / y por qué hemos matado
tan estúpidamente. / Nuestros padres mintieron: eso es todo” (9).
51
In spite of his criticism of his father’s parenting methods and political beliefs, his
move toward autobiography betrays a desire to communicate with his father in a way that
he failed to do in previous spoken and written attempts: “Si intentara decírtelo de viva
voz, en una conversación entre tú y yo, a solas, no me escucharías. No me escucharía
nadie” (9). Because the two men do not speak to one another, Juaristi uses the
autobiographical text as a way of reaching out to his father; towards the end he refers to
the text as “. . . nuestra conversación fingida, que ya me va pareciendo verdadera, como
si estuvieras ahí sentado, al otro lado del ordenador” (175). The imaginary presence of
Juaristi’s father at the other end the computer as he writes is indicative of what Angel
Loureiro, in The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain,
recognizes as a distinctive characteristic of the autobiographical genre. According to
Loureiro, autobiography, more than any other genre, depends on its addressees, for the
autobiographer is compelled to write by an ethical (based upon Lévinas’s notion of
ethics) responsibility to respond to the call of an Other: the addressee (Loureiro xii-xiii).
In the case of La tribu atribulada, when Juaristi addresses his father, he also seeks to
address all Basque nationalist fathers on behalf of their sons, or his generation: “Sé que
necesito escribirte para que otros lean lo que te escribo, que debo explicarte lo que quiero
que otros entiendan,” because “Casi todos los que conozco de mi generación dicen lo
mismo de sus padres. . . . Los métodos variaban, pero la pedagogía tribal era idéntica . . .”
(14). Juaristi’s estranged father as addressee is representative of the abominable Basque
Other that, as a consequence of its refusal to be assimilated into the Spanish nation, must
be dejected by it. Yet this does not keep Juaristi from incessantly yearning for its
integration, hence his repeated attempts to reach out to it and to his father.
In his incisive review of Juaristi’s 1997 essay El bucle melancólico. Historias de
nacionalistas vascos, Gabilondo notices Juaristi’s replacement of the academic prose and
history of his earlier publications for a blend of biography, autobiography, tabloid
exposé, gossip, opinionated statements, innuendos, name-calling, and personal
52
revelations, which Gabilondo describes as primal, irrational, and libidinal discourse (“Jon
Juaristi” 548). As a means of explaining this change, Gabilondo calls attention to the
binary that Juaristi establishes in an earlier work11 between the enlightened discourse
upon which the modern nation-state is founded and the prehistoric irrationality of the
“Basque nationalist primal scene,” whose indefinite origins (like the unknown origins of
the Basque language) predate history, are ever-shifting, and consequently resist rationalist
discourse (547). Therefore, in order to reach a Basque nationalist reader, Juaristi must
abandon his academic discourse and enter the Real. Or, to borrow Juaristi’s own analogy
from Sacra Némesis, he must cross back over Hell’s Bridge and reenter the terrible
Basque womb.12 Gabilondo cleverly observes that Juaristi’s obsession with gaining
access to and control over the prehistoric Basque Real stems from his desire to be a
paternal authority there. He notes that “if Juaristi abandons History and its rationality, he
gains protagonism: he is now part of the Basque nationalist primal scene. He can redefine
the primal scene, retell it, exert violence in it, and derive enjoyment from it” (548). Citing
Freud, Gabilondo notes that “the primal scene is the origin of fatherly violence and
enjoyment at the same time,” adding that, “In the Basque nationalist primal scene too,
there is epistemic and political violence effected by the nationalist father” in the form of
the distortion of history and reality (546). By means of the hearsay and insults which
abound in El bucle melancólico, Juaristi joins those nationalist fathers (who include
Unamuno and Sabino Arana Goiri, among others) in inflicting narrative violence on the
Basque nationalist scene, through which he derives political enjoyment (547).13
11 Vestigios de Babel: Para una arqueología de los nacionalismos españoles (1992).
12 The rational/irrational binary is bound up with the masculine/feminine binary that
Juaristi uses to express the difference between Spanish and Basque national identities.
13 Gabilondo adds that readers shared in this pleasure, making El bucle melancólico a
bestseller.
53
In La tribu atribulada one can certainly find traces of the insults and irrationalism
that Gabilondo sheds light on in El bucle melancólico. For example, Juaristi takes
juvenile delight in calling the PNV’s former spokesperson in the Spanish parliament
Iñaki Anasagasti “Ana Sagasti” and “la mutante calva” (91, 128). Yet I would argue that
with La tribu atribulada, and specifically its autobiographical elements, Juaristi, more
than perpetuating the same trauma and violence apparent in El bucle melancólico,
furthers his project of converting himself into the father who will once and for all bring
law and order to the Basque Country. He does so by displacing his own father from the
scene and demonstrating his own credentials as the best replacement father figure to fill
the patriarchal vacuum in Basque society. First of all, he denies his father his paternal
role by stripping him of the name “father”: “Ni siquiera te daré un nombre (a ti, que me
diste el mío). Aita (“padre”) no es todavía un nombre, aunque es más que un pronombre.
Designa un lugar y una función. Mejor dicho, varias funciones. La primera de ellas,
imponer la Ley: situar al hijo en el orden simbólico” (La tribu 11). Because he failed to
perform his most important task of maintaining order, Juaristi refuses to call him
“father,” referring to him only as “tú.” While depriving his father of paternal authority,
Juaristi also expresses his intention to fulfill that paternal role. The desired shift in power
is clear from the outset when Juaristi positions himself as the teacher and his father as
pupil: “Voy a explicarte lo que he llegado a saber, en contra y a pesar de lo que me
enseñaste” (10). And later, after digressing from his central argument, Juaristi again
highlights his role as instructor: “Me he perdido otra vez, pero no importa. Hay que
instruir deleitando” (177). Another way he reveals his paternal ambitions is by bringing
his own son into the discussion, implying that his father’s time has passed, and that it is
his turn to set things right for the next generation:
Pero no volveré, Aita.
Bolo-Bolón [Juaristi’s son] se merece otra cosa. No puedo permitir
que crezca a merced de la Tribu Paranoica. (195)
54
Here, in the epilogue, Juaristi finally addresses his father as Aita (Dad), but only as a term
of endearment, since by now the transfer of paternal authority is already complete. A
third way that Juaristi aspires to be a father is by aligning himself with his mentor Joseba,
the man who exemplifies for Juaristi the intellectual and political skepticism that his
father lacked. He implies his similarity to Joseba when he recounts sleeping in Joseba’s
old bedroom and reading from his book collection, which can be understood as a
representation of his entrance into the Symbolic Order. And he expresses it more
explicitly when he recalls, twenty years after Joseba’s death, meeting a man in
Washington D.C. who coincidentally had been one of Joseba’s parishioners in Miami.
The stranger commended the priest’s efforts to help exiled Cubans, and then, struck by
the resemblance between uncle and nephew, remarked to Juaristi, “Usted se le parece
mucho” (36). Juaristi recalls that in that moment, “Al remordimiento por haber defendido
alguna vez una de las más siniestras satrapías de nuestro tiempo se unió el orgullo
irracional de ser de la estirpe de monseñor Juaristi, y rogué interiormente que algún día
llegara a ser verdad aquel usted se le parece mucho” (36). His desire to live up to
Joseba’s likeness corresponds with his aim to gain legitimate patriarchal authority. To
achieve this, he must demonstrate that he has moved sufficiently beyond his regretful
nationalist youth.
If throughout La tribu atribulada Juaristi emasculates Basque men and the
Basque Country in order to delegitimize them as political actors, then it follows that he
would prove his credentials for legitimate fatherhood by demonstrating his masculinity:
namely, that he is independent, courageous, and aggressive. I cited above Juaristi’s
suggestion in Cambio de destino that his rejection of his mother’s breast milk
foreshadowed his eventual separation from the Basque tribe. In the epilogue of La tribu
atribulada, Juaristi quotes the title of former lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe’s political
memoir El futuro nos pertenece, and then counters it with his own ironic version:
TOMORROW BELONGS
55
TOMORROW BELONGS
TOMORROW BELONGS
TO ME (195)
Here Juaristi highlights the similarity between the title of Ibarretxe’s memoir and the
famous song from the musical Cabaret “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” a Nazi propagandist
song (in the context of the musical) performed by an indoctrinated adolescent. This
reference likens Basque nationalism, represented by Ibarretxe, to German National
Socialism, a comparison that appears frequently in Juaristi’s work, as will become clear
in Chapter Two. It also underscores Juaristi’s eschewal of the, in his view propagandist,
Basque nationalist narratives that once shaped his thinking, but that he hopes will not
influence his own son.
Juaristi weans himself from Ibarretxe’s Basque “us,” setting out on his own path,
just as Joseba did when he opted to leave the Basque Country and head overseas. Once
Juaristi finally separates himself from the Basque family, he wipes away all traces of
nationalist delusion and becomes a fully independent man with rational, mature political
positions, in contrast to Ander’s perpetual attachment to his mother and resulting
childlike worldview. It could be argued that the striking absence of women from his
oeuvre (besides those, such as Begoña, who are merely symbolic) is yet another
demonstration of Juaristi’s total separation from the maternal Real. (The one time he
mentions his mother in La tribu atribulada, he calls her “tu mujer” (102).) Eventually,
Juaristi becomes a public intellectual, demonstrating his complete passage into the
Symbolic Order. This stage of independence qualifies Juaristi to usurp the paternal role
that his own father never properly fulfilled. As Adams and Coltrane point out, patriarchy
requires that young men separate from the family to solidify their masculinity before
eventually returning to the family setting as fathers: “Having internalized personal
interpretations of masculine ideals and subsequently experienced valorization and
reinforcement of those ideals in institutionalized settings, young men are expected to
56
(re)turn to the family setting to prove their maturity and enact what they have learned
about being men” (239). This is exactly what Joseba did when, after decades of
experiences abroad, he returned to the Basque Country and educated Juaristi in
liberalism, and it is what Juaristi yearns to emulate.
One of the institutionalized settings that simultaneously marked Juaristi’s
independence from Basque nationalism and reinforced his masculinity was the military. It
is no coincidence that it was in Logroño in 1973, during a meal with his parents and
Ander following the swearing-in ceremony initiating his obligatory military service (his
three visitors, naturally, declined to attend the ceremony), that Juaristi had his revelation
about Ander’s mother-complex as the root of his Basque nationalism. In spite of his
annoyance with and simultaneous pity for Ander during the meal, Juaristi dreaded his
upcoming military service, expecting to miss his home region’s food especially. Yet, to
his surprise, he ended up immensely enjoying the food served in the military: “Para las
melancolías vascas no hay mejor remedio que las meriendas riojanas” (La tribu 77).
Through its cuisine, Juaristi fell in love with La Rioja, and by extension, non-Basque
Spain, ridding himself completely of his homesickness. While Juaristi never claims to
have enjoyed his months in the military, he recognizes it as an experience he had to
endure “para cumplir mis deberes para con la Patria.” (80). As Joane Nagel observes,
duty is one of the trademarks of twentieth-century Western masculinity and nationalisms
(“Masculinity” 252). Juaristi’s military service confirms his masculinity and
corresponding loyalty to the Spanish State. Long after his military days, Juaristi continues
to conceptualize his relationship with Basque nationalism in the language of warfare. For
example, he rejects labeling his move to Madrid as exile or escape, instead understanding
it as a tactical move: “Jamás se me pasó por la cabeza que vivir en Madrid implicaba
dejar de combatir al nacionalismo vasco. La huida es un movimiento táctico: uno se
repliega para poder atacar mejor” (La tribu 129). Juaristi also recounts a conference on
nationalisms at which he was invited to speak by the University of Barcelona’s
57
Philosophy Department. Before his panel began, Catalan and Basque nationalist student
protestors had already crowded the lobby and lecture hall. Upon seeing the chaos,
conservative politician Alejo Vidal-Quadras, with whom Juaristi was to share the panel,
turned around and left. Juaristi, recognizing that the defense of constitutionalism
depended solely on him, courageously soldiered ahead: “Así que, sin un lamento, sin el
menor comentario, me dirigí al matadero, seguido por un puñado de fieles de gesto
austero” (172). But before he had a chance to begin his presentation, he noticed that
protestors had splashed some of his fellow conference participants with paint. In anger,
Juaristi greeted the room with “un corte de mangas,” which provoked the protestors to
hurl rocks, lighters and coins at the panel (172). While he and the loyal “legionarios y
legionarias” who were in attendance to support Juaristi were being pummeled by the
flying objects, Juaristi, from behind the panel table, provoked the protestors again “con el
puño cerrado vuelto hacia arriba y el dedo corazón en erección fastuosa” (172). In case
this phallic image were not enough to prove Juaristi’s manliness, he took it a step further
when one of the agitators flung the papers of his speech into the air: “Agarré el soporte
del micrófono y traté de encaramarme a la mesa para caer sobre él y, como dicen en
México, partirle la madre” (173). The conference organizers begged Juaristi to stop
provoking, if only to prove that they are not as brutish as their enemies. Juaristi agrees
that he is not like them, adding, “Yo, en concreto, puedo ser mucho peor. Dejadme
demostrarlo de una vez” (173). Had his bodyguard not physically restrained him, he
would have done just that. Although he was not able to punish the protestors as he would
have liked, after they fled the scene Juaristi did get the final word, which he shouted in
the name of the Constitution: “Visca la Constitució! (Long live the Constitution!)” (174).
Juaristi paints the scene like a battle in which he is the only soldier who is willing to fight
back in defense of the Constitution. The fact that his opposition in this scene consists of
young students is important. Juaristi portrays himself as a Don Camilo in a room full of
rowdy Peppones, and like Camilo, Juaristi is willing and able to employ the violence that
58
a father must, according to the Law of the Father, in order to ensure his sons’ entrance
into the Symbolic Order.
Gabilondo views the libidinous irrationalism of El bucle melancólico as a positive
shift in Juaristi’s literary trajectory, thanks to its abandonment of rationalist discourse and
embrace of his personal story: “For the time being, Juaristi has opened up the way to
begin a true archaeology of Spanish nationalisms: to tell nationalist stories from within
the nationalist scene (primal or otherwise) but without taking refuge in some
transcendental position of rational and fatherly mastery” (“Jon Juaristi” 552). Gabilondo
also emphasizes that accusing Juaristi of “españolismo” is misguided, because the
melancholy, trauma, and violence apparent in Juaristi’s writing all originate in the Basque
nationalist primal scene. My analysis of La tribu atribulada, published five years after El
bucle melancólico, suggests a different trajectory in Juaristi’s work than the one
Gabilondo optimistically predicted. La tribu atribulada reveals a Juaristi yearning to
enter the Basque nationalist scene, but only for the sake of bringing patriarchal order to it.
When Juaristi as father strives to figuratively push the Basque Country out of the Real
and into the Symbolic Order, he is in practice aiming to assimilate it into the state. Thus,
in La tribu atribulada Juaristi not only recuperates the voice of fatherly mastery
momentarily abandoned in El bucle melancólico, but he uses it in the service of the
dominant Spanish nationalism that is upheld by the state, its constitution, and its
institutions. Furthermore, Juaristi tries to delegitimize Basque nationalism through
emasculation and proves his own authority through assertion of his masculinity,
unabashedly associating legitimate political power with aggressive masculinity and
proving himself resistant to moving beyond traditional patriarchal power structures and
their perpetuation of violence in search of a peaceful resolution of the conflict between
Basque and Spanish nationalists. Such intransience is what Epps identifies as “the
fundamental paradox of constitutional democracy”: “the pretension on the part of one
generation to impose its will, via a written constitution, on future generations even as it
59
would sever itself from the often inchoate will of previous generations (sometimes, as in
Spain, codified in a series of previous constitutions)” (588). While Juaristi glorifies his
break from the political project of his father, he simultaneously seeks to muffle the young
protestors in opposition to his politics and insulate his son from Basque nationalist
influence. La tribu atribulada’s rigid adherence to the status quo, including its denial of
reform or alternative interpretations of the Constitution and its exclusion of women as
political agents, threatens to cut Juaristi off from future discussion of national identities in
Spain. After all, if Juaristi rejected the father who refused to listen to him, the sons in the
next generation – and let us not forget the daughters – may do the same to Juaristi.
60
CHAPTER 2: BASQUE GHOSTS, SPANISH SPECTERS:
NATIONALIST HAUNTINGS IN JON JUARISTI’S CAMBIO DE
DESTINO: MEMORIAS
If the biographical and autobiographical elements in El bucle melancólico (1997)
and La tribu atribulada (2003) represent a partial departure from the academic prose of
Juaristi’s early essays, it is with Cambio de destino. Memorias (2007) that Juaristi fully
embraces the autobiographical genre. Cambio de destino is a chronological account of
Juaristi’s life in the Basque Country, beginning with a synopsis of his family tree and a
selection of childhood memories, and ending with his permanent departure from Bilbao
in 1999. The autobiography also traces Juaristi’s ideological journey from left to right
and from Basque nationalist to anti-Basque nationalist, understood by Juaristi as a
rejection of the Basque nationalist legacy he inherited and an adoption of an alternative,
purportedly “non-nationalist,” lineage. In Cambio de destino Juaristi employs a ghost
motif (already partially developed in El bucle melancólico and Sacra Némesis (1999)) to
express first the Basque nationalist destiny imposed upon him by his ancestors and then
his marginalization within the Basque Country upon “changing” that destiny. To do this,
he establishes an opposition between two different types of ghosts. He characterizes the
nationalist ghosts as dangerous ancestral voices constantly threatening to reemerge and
seduce new generations of young men into fighting for an ethnic nationalism
incompatible with democracy. The non-nationalist ghosts, by contrast, become ghostly
when they choose to dismiss the ancestral voices, defend democracy, and consequently
disappear from the unwelcoming nationalist community. Juaristi, then, after being led
into ETA by the ghosts of his nationalist ancestors, later disavows them and becomes a
phantom himself, no longer visible in his home region. With this autobiography, he aims
to haunt the Basque Country with an alternative story to those told by the nationalist
voices.
61
Informed by Avery Gordon’s theory of the ghost, which centers on questions of
power and the specter’s subversion of it, I will examine how Juaristi’s rhetorical
maneuvers to undermine Basque nationalism reveal his alignment, not with nonnationalism as he claims, but rather with the dominant discourses of, and privileged
position within the institutions of a patriarchal Spanish nationalism, calling into question
both his purported spectrality and the alternative nature of his narrative. My analysis of
Cambio de destino will engage with Joseba Gabilondo’s and Carrie Hamilton’s
discussions of the best-selling El bucle melancólico (1997), where Juaristi initiated his
shift toward the autobiographical genre. Both scholars, though mainly critical of Juaristi’s
essentialist binaries, detected signs in El bucle melancólico that pointed toward a
possibility for more open and inclusive narratives in the future. This chapter revisits
Juaristi’s work to evaluate how almost a decade later his move toward autobiography,
culminating with Cambio de destino, instead betrays an evolution toward increasingly
polarizing discourse.
Ancestral Voices and Non-Nationalist Ghosts
In the first chapter of Cambio de destino, titled “Nomen omen,” Juaristi outlines
his family tree, positioning his ancestors within local Basque history and uncovering their
influence on his own worldview. The most haunting member of Juaristi’s family tree is
his father’s brother, after whom he was named: Jon Juaristi, who accidentally killed
himself with a pistol at the age of fourteen in April of 1937. Juaristi remembers that after
having discovered his uncle’s gravestone as a child, “(n)o era solo la asociación de mi
nombre con la muerte lo que me desazonaba. Hasta ese momento, Jon había sido un
fantasma con el rango ontológico del Coco, alguien tan perfecto que su mera existencia
resultaba increíble” (Juaristi, Cambio 16). Upon the discovery of this family ghost,
Juaristi developed “(l)a convicción obsesiva de poseer en el más allá un Doppelgänger
cuyo destino determinaría el mío . . .” (17). Juaristi understands his supernatural
62
connection to his Uncle Jon as extending beyond the fate of an immature death; his
cursed named also conjures up the historical events surrounding his uncle’s death: the
Spanish Civil War. He recalls that in the neighborhood where he grew up, many of his
friends belonged to “familias del bando vencedor,” or Francoists, who felt uncomfortable
with his Basque-sounding last name. His name, then, seemed doubly cursed: “O sea que
era como cargar con una suerte de destino. Por partida doble: dentro de la familia,
activaba la memoria incómoda y dolorosa de la muerte del tío; fuera de ella, la de la
guerra civil. Nomen omen. El nombre como fatalidad y presagio” (18-19). Juaristi’s name
summons Basque history beyond the Civil War, all the way back to the Carlist Wars of
the nineteenth century. He notes that not far from where Uncle Jon died, the Carlist
general Tomás de Zumalacárregui received a fatal gunshot wound in 1835. With this
comment, Juaristi spatially links his uncle’s death – and by extension, himself – with the
demise of Zumalacárregui14. He underscores this resurgence of the past in the present
when he describes how on the eve of his fifteenth birthday he celebrated having escaped
Uncle Jon’s fate of dying at the age of fourteen by “ jugando a la ruleta rusa con el
pequeño revólver de un amigo del colegio, pistolero carlista en ciernes” (17). This scene
also foreshadows Juaristi’s later involvement in uniting Carlist and ETA circles. Juaristi
interprets his name as an adverse destiny inherited from his Carlist and nationalist
ancestors and family members, a destiny that pushed him toward his future involvement
in ETA.
Cambio de destino is not Juaristi’s first examination of the role of doomful
inheritance in the making of ETA members. In his 1997 essay El bucle melancólico.
Historias de nacionalistas vascos, Juaristi dismantles, from a socio-psychoanalytical
14 General Zumalacárregui is a hero to Basque nationalists who interpret the Carlist
Wars and the resulting loss of the Basques’ foral privileges as an invasion by the Spanish.
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perspective, the mythical stories told in the Basque Country that transmit nationalist
fervor from one generation to the next:
Historias de nacionalistas. He aquí la clave de la reproducción de
todo nacionalismo: relatos que transmiten una lejana y lancinante
melancolía . . . muchos vascos de mi generación estuvimos
expuestos a los significantes deletéreos de ese tipo de historias:
narraciones sacrificiales de amor y de inmolación, de heroísmo y
de culpa, de traiciones y derrotas. Las he oído desde mis días de
escolar, en el patio del colegio, en los fuegos de campamento, en
las sobremesas familiares. (Juaristi, Bucle 18)
Juaristi declares that storytelling was the method through which his dark destiny was
passed onto him. The Carlist and Civil Wars to which Juaristi links himself in Cambio de
destino via his uncle’s death and namesake are especially fecund sources of nationalist
stories, as both have been interpreted by Basque nationalists as painful defeats against the
Spanish oppressor; the Carlist Wars ended with the forced elimination of the Basque
Provinces’ foral government, and the Civil War was followed by the suppression of the
Basque language and political activism under the Francoist regime. Juaristi sustains in El
bucle melancólico that nationalist mythology portrays Basque history as a series of
losses, a progression from a past paradise to the present desert. The collective
melancholia resulting from the loss of the fatherland is what motivates new generations
of Basques to fight to recover their lost nation (19). El bucle melancólico carefully traces
the progression of Basque nationalism from one male generation to the next, beginning
with the nineteenth-century fueristas and the subsequent generation that bore Unamuno,
Sabino Arana, and the beginning of Basque nationalism. Juaristi then sets his sights on
the children of the Civil War who constituted the first generation of ETA, followed by
second-generation etarras such as Javier Etxebarrieta (“Txabi”)15. Finally, the
chronological analysis concludes with a reproachment of the contemporary political
leaders who Juaristi believes to be apologists for the radicalism responsible for PP
15 Etxebarrieta was the first etarra to die for the nationalist cause hours after he killed
the Guardia Civil officer José Pardines Arcay on June 7, 1968.
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councilor Miguel Ángel Blanco’s 1997 murder at the hands of ETA. Throughout the
essay Juaristi underscores how each generation of Basque nationalist men determines its
descendants’ actions.
Already in El bucle melancólico Juaristi interprets this intergenerational influence
as a kind of haunting. For example, one of the losses suffered by Basque nationalists at
the hands of Francoists occurred in 1960 when they demolished Sabin Etxea, the birth
home of Sabino Arana Goiri in the Abando neighborhood of Bilbao, which had been
converted into the PNV’s headquarters. The destruction of the house devastated
nationalists, not only because of its symbolic attack on the figure of Arana Goiri, but also
because of the cultural and patriotic significance of the house in the Basque Country,
where traditional social organization once centered upon patriarchal clans called exteak
(houses). As Juaristi explains, “la casa simboliza la continuidad del pueblo, la unidad de
las generaciones por encima de la contingencia de las vidas individuales: es el eslabón
que traba a los muertos con los que están todavía por nacer” (346). Juaristi remembers
seeing his grandfather cry when Sabin Etxea was torn down and hearing his friends’ tell
of witnessing their grandfathers’ despair as well. The destruction of Sabin Etxea
saddened in his grandfather’s generation, which in turn provoked vengeful anger among
his own peers, who would go on to express that rancor in ETA: “La destrucción de Sabin
Etxea nos puso, a mí y a otros, en la línea de salida del breve recorrido sentimental que
terminaría en ETA” (346). Remarkably, these “nietos de la ira16” consisted of not only
grandsons of nationalists, but also of youths who did not come from nationalist families,
who did not have Basque roots, and in some cases, whose family members were
Francoists (348). To explain the power that the crumbling of Sabino Arana’s house had in
sparking violent nationalist activism in young men from such diverse backgrounds,
16 Juaristi cites Basque journalist Patxo Unzueta’s study of this phenomenon, Los nietos
de la ira (1988).
65
Juaristi invokes the supernatural: “Era como si, al echar abajo el caserón de Abando,
todos los fantasmas que habían permanecido afligidos entre sus paredes se hubiesen
desparramado por el país exigiendo venganza” (348). One of the places where the ghosts
who were expelled from Sabin Etxea went to haunt, says Juaristi, was the Escolapios
school in Bilbao. Located near Sabin Etxea, the spacious building that eventually became
a school had served as a barracks for gudaris17 at the start of the Civil War and
subsequently as a prison for Republicans after Nationalist forces had taken control the
city. The Escolapios school was a place “donde se concentraron no solo los fantasmas
desahuciados de Sabin Etxea . . . ” but also “los de los gudaris del 36 y los de los presos
del 37 . . . .” (356). According to Juaristi, just as the ghosts released from Sabin Etxea
pushed him and his peers toward violent nationalism, the ghosts abounding in the
Escolapios school led many of its students into ETA. The most famous Escolapios
student-turned etarra was Javier Etxebarrieta, who, before his immature death, wrote a
collection of poetry called Las turbias potestades, the title of which Juaristi finds eerily
similar to Irish republican Patrick Pearse’s Ghosts (384). In Ghosts, Pearse warns that the
ghosts of a nation must be obeyed:
Here be ghosts that I have raised this Christmastide, ghosts of dead
men that have bequeathed a trust to us living men. Ghosts are
troublesome things in a house or in a family, as we knew even
before Ibsen taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost.
You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation
sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased,
whatever the cost. (Pearse 222)
Fittingly, the term Juaristi applies to these murky powers of the nation’s past that demand
present-day sacrifices is also borrowed from the Irish context: Juaristi’s voces ancestrales
are an allusion to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s criticism of Irish Republicanism Ancestral
Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland. As Juaristi relates in Sacra Némesis, the
17 “Warrior” or “soldier” in Basque. In the context of the Spanish Civil War, the term
refers specifically to members of Eusko Gudarostea, the Basque nationalist army that fought for
the Republic.
66
thesis of which is largely modeled on Ancestral Voices, O’Brien taught him that the
power of ancestral voices is too dangerous to ignore and therefore must be reckoned with
either through analysis or through art. While O’Brien’s work represents the first
approach, Juaristi lauds his other Irish role model, James Joyce, for the latter, particularly
in the closing story of Dubliners, “The Dead.” Juaristi interprets the story’s protagonist
Gabriel’s unsettling discovery about his wife’s past as a lesson in how the ghosts of the
past, when ignored, can reappear and wreak havoc in the present:
Excelente parábola: no podemos vivir sordos a las voces
ancestrales. Si nos empeñamos en desoírlas, volverán con más
fuerza que nunca, vindicativas y destructoras. Joyce . . . no
despreció de las voces que llegaban de lo profundo de Irlanda.
Conocía su poder. Las sometió a su arte, pero, para ello, tuvo antes
que exponerse a su fascinación, a su peligroso encanto. Por el
contrario, Gabriel – que ha pretendido ignorarlas – verá su mundo
destruido por la súbita irrupción de los muertos . . . . (Sacra 18)
The danger presented by the ancestral voices extends far beyond Gabriel’s domestic
drama; according to Juaristi, these ghosts “. . . anuncian la muerte de la Irlanda británica,
de la Irlanda moderna y cosmopolita, liberal y laica . . . .” (19). In the Basque Country,
Juaristi continues, these vengeful ghosts first appeared upon the defeat of Carlism in the
nineteenth century, precisely at the moment when it seemed as though “la secularización
había triunfado y se abrían ante nosotros amplias perspectivas de libertad” (19). In both
the Irish and Basque settings, Juaristi notes, ancestral voices pose a threat to liberal
democracy.
In Cambio de destino Juaristi identifies the voces ancestrales that spoke to him
personally. He recounts, for example, that his nationalist grandfather Pablo bought him a
copy of Viaje a Navarra durante la insurrección de los vascos (1835), a proto-nationalist
text written by Joseph-Augustin Chaho (1810-1858), a Carlist sympathizer from France’s
Basque territory. His grandfather’s transmission of Chaho’s story to him had a crucial
impact on his future political activism: “Como había pronosticado mi abuelo, su lectura
me cautivó. Fue el primer hito importante en la educación sentimental que me llevaría a
67
ETA” (Cambio 107). Unsurprisingly, Chaho’s is the first narrative that Juaristi aims to
debunk in El bucle melancólico, which, like the subsequent Sacra Némesis, display
Juaristi’s efforts to critically analyze nationalist stories. But beyond that, Juaristi, still
following O’Brien’s lead, also calls for the dissemination of alternative non-nationalist
stories to counteract those myths: “¿Por qué nunca hemos intentado contar historias
alternativas, autoexplicarnos también nosotros, los disidentes del nacionalismo vasco?”
(Bucle 27). Substituting the traditional historical monograph, Juaristi’s second intellectual
weapon in the battle against nationalist mythology is the narration of personal and
familial stories. Cambio de destino represents Juaristi’s non-nationalist autoexplicación.
In it, Juaristi uncovers and rejects the familial and national ghosts - such as his uncle Jon,
his grandfather Pablo, Zumalacárregui, and Chaho - whose fates and ideological projects
he inherited, and tells an alternative story of how he managed to change his destiny. He
asserts this new destiny in the final chapter of Cambio de destino, where he narrates his
departure from the Basque Country after having his life threatened by ETA and reminds
the reader that he will never rest alongside his Uncle Jon in Bilbao’s cemetery. His
physical separation from the Basque Country affirms the broken connection between the
ancestral voices and his former destiny. To emphasize this, Juaristi concludes the book
with a farewell poem to Bilbao:
Cuando cierres la puerta, no hagas ruido.
La casa bulliciosa
Olvidará tu paso al poco de irte
Como se olvida un sueño desabrido. (391, first stanza)
Here Juaristi undoubtedly alludes to a 1963 poem by one of his personal and literary
mentors, Gabriel Aresti (1933-1975): “Aitaren etxea” (“My Father’s House”), in which
the poetic voice promises to sacrifice everything – including his own soul – to defend his
father’s house against outside threats. Aresti’s poem, reflecting the symbolic significance
of the house as Basque fatherland and language, may have been inspired by the
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destruction of Sabin Etxea (Bucle 347-8). In Juaristi’s poem, the poetic subject addresses
himself in the second person as he leaves the figurative house that he had once defended
as a young etarra. His rejection of the Basque nationalist house leads to his erasure from
its collective memory; he seemingly disappears, and no one notices the trace he leaves
behind.
Though Juaristi may have been forgotten in his former home, he is not alone; in
the final pages of Cambio de destino Juaristi assembles a pantheon of deceased Basque
men who, like himself, have been converted into specters by Basque nationalist
oppression. Included in this group is Aresti, whose “acendrada independencia de criterio”
(Sacra 229) precluded his participation in any political organizations (besides an early
brief stint in Euzko Gaztedi) and whose vehement support for the implementation
Euskera Batua, the unified form of Basque, brought him disparagement from linguistic
purists, who were especially intolerant of Batua’s (and Aresti’s poems’) adoption of
Castilian expressions which had infiltrated colloquial Basque speech during centuries of
contact between the two languages. Another accused traitor of the radical nationalist
cause whom Juaristi lists among his ghostly peers was one of his friends and mentors
Gabriel del Moral Zabala, who shifted his support from the PNV, to the PCE, and later
involved himself with the PP before his death in 1987. One more member of Juaristi’s
group of side-changers is Mario Onaindía (1948-2003), who abandoned his ETA roots to
speak out against the organization from within the PSOE.
Juaristi addresses these now invisible figures, portraying them as ghosts and
uniting himself with them: “Mis buenos compañeros de otros días, galería de sombras.
No me abandonaréis, porque en vosotros mismos la eternidad os cambia . . . Acaso
también yo empiezo ahora a morir, a afantasmarme como vosotros, farra querida de
aquellos tiempos” (391). He then quotes Joyce’s Ulysses to suggest that his self-changed
destiny has transformed him into an apparition in the Basque Country: “Un hombre –
escribió Joyce – se convierte para los suyos en fantasma impalpable por muerte, ausencia
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o cambio de costumbres. O simplemente por cambio de destino18” (391). He expresses
this same desire to join the non-nationalist ghost club earlier in Cambio de destino as he
recounts Gabriel del Moral Zabala’s funeral, during which he imagines the recently
deceased fraternizing with Aresti in heaven: “Espero que me hagan un sitio cuando llegue
. . . ” (372). Just as Cambio de destino constitutes an alternative to Basque nationalist
tales, these non-nationalist ghosts with which Juaristi identifies are alternatives to the
ancestral voices that haunted his youth and pushed him toward ETA. Juaristi positions the
ancestral voices and non-nationalist ghosts in clear opposition to one another: the former
stifle and threaten social progress and liberty; the latter are victims of retrograde tyranny
who bravely assert their independence from and opposition to it.
Juaristi’s characterization of his community of alternative ghosts as social figures
that are repressed and virtually erased by a hegemonic power calls to mind Avery
Gordon’s theory of the ghost in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination. Inspired by, but aiming to extend beyond psychoanalytical and Marxist
understandings of haunting, Gordon defines the ghost as a social figure that has been
repressed, ignored, or made invisible by dominant social, economic, and political
structures. Gordon calls for a transformation of sociological analysis by shifting its focus
toward “the marginal, . . . what we normally exclude or banish, or, more commonly, . . .
what we never even notice” (24-5). This radical change entails a new kind of academic
writing, thus the question Gordon’s study proposes is, “First what are the alternative
stories we ought to and can write about the relationship among power, knowledge, and
experience?” (23). Two examples that Gordon provides of effective alternative “ghost
18 “What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into
impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners” (Episode 9, “Scylla
and Charybdis”). The character who speaks these words in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, is also the
protagonist of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this semi-autobiographical
novel, Stephen rejects his family, religion, and nation in his quest for the independence he needs
to achieve his artistic goals. With this quote, Juaristi alludes to the similarities between his life
path and Stephen’s (and by extension Joyce’s).
70
stories” are Luisa Valenzuela’s engagement with the ghosts of the “disappeared” of
Argentina’s Dirty War and Toni Morrison’s account of the ghosts of U.S. slavery that
haunted the Reconstruction Era. In the case of the ghosts with whom Juaristi identifies in
Cambio de destino, it is the dominant nationalist culture in the Basque Country that has
banished them to the shadowy margins; in order to prove their spectral nature, Juaristi
first establishes the totalitarian nature of Basque nationalism and constructs a dichotomy
between nationalist and non-nationalist Basques.
The Basque Totalitarian Family
Juaristi became a specter of Basque nationalists’ oppression when he broke from
his nationalist father and grandfather and the destiny they had imposed upon him; yet at
the same time this move tied him to his more appealing liberal ancestors. In the first
chapter of Cambio de destino, while he negatively portrays his Carlist ancestors as
xenophobic and narrow-minded, he is pleased to link himself to his great-grandfather
Nicolás Juaristi and great-great-grandfather Felipe Juaristi, both of whom he depicts as
open-minded liberal carpenters: “Me complace descender de una antigua estirpe de
carpinteros” (21). He celebrates that the word “zur” (“wood”) is the etymological root of
his last name: “Adoro la madera. La prefiero a todas las demás materias terrenales y . . .
la considero moralmente superior al hierro y a la piedra” (Cambio 21). He goes on to
establish a connection between the Basque words for “carpenter” and “artisan” (arotza)
and “foreigner” (arrotza), explaining that in rural communities the artisan always came
from elsewhere: “Es un extraño, un extranjero, ajeno al mundo estamental o clánico . . . ,”
granting him “la independencia, la movilidad social y geográfica y, desde luego, la
mentalidad villana, más abierta y desprejuiciada que la del hombre de campo” (23).
These circumstances were not always easy for the liberal outsider. Nicolás, like the
ancestors of many bilbaínos, was driven from his native town of Azcoitia to Bilbao by
Carlists in 1833: “Había sido patriota de los del Trienio, un doceañista: o sea, un traidor .
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. . . De ese renegado desciendo, y tampoco reniego de él” (Bucle 327). By calling his
great-grandfather a “renegado,” the label used for those punished as traitors to
Catholicism under the Inquisition, Juaristi likens the xenophobic Carlist fervor from
which Basque nationalism descended to the horrors of the Inquisition. In this way,
Juaristi situates the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy that he constructs between the
ancestral voices of Basque nationalism and the non-nationalist ghosts in distant history,
once taking the form of the Inquisition and its victims, and later of the rural Carlists and
the mistreated liberal minority. Underpinning this continuation of oppression from the
Inquisition to the present are Juaristi’s arguments in Vestigios de Babel that Basque
nationalists’ claim of being an exceptional, original people of Europe is rooted in antiSemitism (for its dependence upon the Basques’ usurpation of the Jews’ status as the
“chosen people” and their supposed limpieza de sangre, or isolation from Jews and
Muslims), along with Juaristi’s own conversion to Judaism after being raised in a
Catholic family, making him a “renegado” and further “othering” him from a purportedly
anti-Semitic Basque nationalist identity. Thus, the “renegados” persecuted under the
Inquisition and the liberals run off by Carlists were precursors to Juaristi’s generation of
ghosts forced by nationalism into spectrality. By linking it to the Inquisition, an
institution epitomizing intolerance and cruelty, Juaristi portrays contemporary Basque
nationalism as retrogressive and tyrannical.
This portrayal of nationalism as backward and oppressive coincides with Basque
historian Juan Pablo Fusi’s in Identidades proscritas: El no nacionalismo en las
sociedades nacionalistas. Here Fusi explores what he considers the overlooked presence
of “non-nationalists” within six communities dominated by nationalist movements: the
Basque Country, Ireland, the Jewish ethnic group, South Africa, Scotland, and Quebec.
He defines non-nationalism as the alternative voices and traditions that, though often
ignored, have always coexisted alongside the nationalism that has overruled these
communities throughout the past century (9). He outlines how the non-nationalists can be
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distinguished from nationalists, describing non-nationalism as a social identity which is
liberated from politicization and which promotes individual rights, civil liberties, civic
values, and an open, plural, and free society. In contrast, he characterizes Basque
nationalism as an irrational, exclusivist force which employs myths to coerce, deny
human rights, and politicize individuals while constructing and imposing upon its
members an artificial national identity (317-18). Because for Fusi those who do not
identify with sub-state nationalism simply “no compartirían las tesis del nacionalismo, ni
vivirían su identidad como nación, ni harían de la idea de nación el fundamento de la
política,” he does not acknowledge that some purported “non-nationalists” may in fact
identify with Spanish nationalism (10). Juaristi makes the same assumption when he
applies the nonspecific term “nacionalismo” to Basque nationalism, never explicitly
acknowledging the existence of Spanish nationalism. By defining those who do not
defend peripheral nationalisms as altogether non-nationalist by default, Juaristi and Fusi
take for granted that the Spanish nation is a natural, unquestionable reality and identify
nationalism with only the “deviant” sectors of Spain’s periphery, namely Catalonia, the
Basque Country, and Galicia. The problematic nature of their use of terminology aside,
their division of Basques into two distinct and historically continuous groups
misrepresents the identitarian dynamics of the community. Balfour and Quiroga
demonstrate that post-dictatorial nation-building efforts in the Basque Country, rather
than create exclusive identities, have resulted in complex dual-identities. This made
evident by a 2003 survey by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas on national
identities in Spain, the results of which defy expectation. Instead of the predicted results
distinguishing Basque, Catalan, and Galician national perceptions from the rest of
Spain’s, the survey in fact reveals a more prominent dichotomy between regions which
identify strongly with Spain and those which identify equally with Spain and region
(Boletín 31 qtd. in Balfour and Quiroga 3-4). These data challenge Juaristi’s facile
nationalist/non-nationalist opposition, as does the existence of a diverse spectrum of
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political parties in the Basque Country outnumbering those in most other autonomous
communities. As Balfour and Quiroga explain, each party’s proposals for the Basque
Country’s future constitute a range of possibilities, including independence from Spain,
various forms of federalism, and conservation of the status quo. What’s more, many
Basques have a tendency to vote differently in regional and national elections, supporting
a nationalist party in the former, and the PSOE, PP, or IU in the latter (153-4, n.15). The
complexity of collective identities in the Basque country leads Balfour and Quiroga to
denote it (and Catalonia, too) a “house of many nations,” in spite of the polarizing
discourse of politicians, journalists, and intellectuals (161).
If dividing Basques into a binary opposition suggests a level of polarization not
reflected by reality, it is also hyperbolic to compare one of those groups to Nazism, as
Juaristi does in his prologue to Contra la violencia, José Varela Ortega’s comparative
study of German and Basque National Socialisms, which seeks to convince Spain’s left
that their alleged generosity toward peripheral nationalism now must be replaced by a
firm defense of Spanish unity, or in other words, the conservatives’ approach (146).
Varela demonstrates the potential danger of failing to rein in abertzalismo by comparing
it to German National Socialism, both of which, he explains, were simultaneously
totalitarian and heterogeneously composed; combined legal and violent tactics; and were
underestimated by moderate politicians, who, foolishly believing themselves capable of
manipulating the extremists to reap their social and political capital, allow their
respective societies to slide away from constitutional order and toward ethnic-based
violence (40-1). In the prologue, Juaristi contends that from its beginnings ETA was
never anti-fascist nor anti-dictatorial, but rather that it borrowed from various forms of
totalitarianism, including Nazism and Stalinism, and that this “totalitarismo sincrético”
has helped them to outlive all of their ideological sources19 (12). One could reason that
19 Embodying this selective borrowing from disparate ideological sources is the
protagonist of Juaristi’s novel La caza salvaje (2007), a Basque nationalist priest enmeshed in
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Juaristi’s (and Varela’s) comparison of the izquierda abertzale with Nazism functions
better as a provocation or scare tactic than as an apt tool of analysis. Slavoj Žižek, for
one, holds that the notion of totalitarianism “guarantee(s) the liberal-democratic
hegemony,” for he finds that any kind of engagement in radical political projects that
attempt to change the status quo is quickly dismissed as certain to result in totalitarian
domination (3). He rejects the concept of totalitarianism as “a kind of stopgap: instead of
enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it
describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking”
(3). Both Juaristi and Varela reproach moderate and non-violent nationalists’ and the
Spanish left’s dialogue with abertzalismo, interpreting it as their attempt to benefit from
extremist sentiment rather than to stamp it out (12, 40-1) and signaling that the
eradication of the threat posed by ETA hinges on the elimination of all forms of Basque
nationalism. Their contention that Basque nationalist political endeavors of any form put
the Basque Country at the risk of plunging into totalitarianism could be read as a tactic
aimed at maintaining the existing order of the unified liberal democratic Spanish State by
criminalizing and shutting down discussion of nationalists’ demands.
Another consequence of comparing abertzalismo to Nazism or Stalinism is that it
detaches it from its political and historical context within the Spanish State, which can
camouflage the role of the state in the emergence and evolution of Basque nationalism.
One way that the state is erased from Juaristi’s account is through the opposition between
nationalists and non-nationalists, which omits Spanish nationalist identities and the role
state institutions play in fomenting them, painting a picture of an internal, local battle
between two opposing sides. He takes this notion of interiority even further with his
Europe’s conflicts during the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century. Starting out as a
gudari, he then becomes a Francoist priest, an aid to the French Resistance, and eventually a
bureaucrat under Hitler and later Tito, swapping ideologies and loyalties whenever it benefits him
personally.
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psychoanalytical approach in El bucle melancólico, purporting that Basque nationalism
was sparked by a few men who confused the melancholy caused by their personal or
familial losses with the Basques’ collective loss of their nation. Unamuno, Txabi, and
Federico Krutwig (1921-1998) (an early ETA ideologue), for example, all lost their
fathers at a tender age (85, 370, 291). ETA founder José Luis Álvarez Emparanza’s
(Txillardegi) (1929-2012), melancholy stemmed from the loss of the house his
grandfather built in San Sebastian when the family business went bankrupt, echoing
Sabino Arana’s grief over his “pequeña tragedia familiar (y municipal)”: the annexation
of his rural homestead by the city of Bilbao (159). Like Arana, Txillardegi transferred his
personal loss to the national level; the Basque Country comes to represent the
dispossessed family home.
This misplaced melancholy is then passed down to subsequent generations, as
Juaristi demonstrates through the recurring theme in his oeuvre of the manipulation of
young men by their nationalist elders. He links ETA’s immature actors to a long line of
naïve Basque terrorists stretching back as far as 1582, when Philip II offered Gaspar de
Añastro, a recently bankrupted merchant from Vitoria, a generous payment in exchange
for the assassination of William the Silent, a leader of the rebellion against the Spanish
crown in the Netherlands. To avoid performing the risky act himself, Añastro recruited
Juan de Jáuregui, a disinherited bilbaíno whose youth, poverty, and
Counterreformationist fanaticism made him an easy target for Añastro. Jáuregui’s
assassination attempt in Antwerp was unsuccessful, and he wound up being killed in the
act. In Juaristi’s eyes, the older Añastro’s exploitation of young Jáuregui’s misguided
religious fervor and economic desperation established “ . . . ciertas pautas que se
repetirán en acontecimientos mucho más próximos a nosotros” (Sacra 64). This pattern
was repeated, Juaristi contends, in 1959 when a young Gabriel del Moral Zabala, then a
member of Euzko Gaztedi, a PNV youth organization, was thrown in jail for displaying
ikurriñas an the Assumption festival in Bilbao. His fellow Euzko Gaztedi militants’
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middle class families promptly bailed them out of jail; only the poor Gabriel and his
sister were left to serve their full sentences. After this abandonment by his comrades,
Moral “salió de la cárcel dispuesto a no dejarse enredar más, como Juan de Jáuregui –
aquel ‘mozo determinado para qualquiera cosa, y pobre’ – por el Añastro de turno” (99).
Juaristi hints at another reiteration of the Añastro-Jáuregui dynamic in the close
relationship between the Sabino Arana’s brother Luis (1862-1951) and Elías Gallastegui
(Gudari) (1892-1974), a leader of the youth nationalist group Juventud Vasca: “. . . dada
por supuesta la simpatía mutua, cabe preguntarse aún en qué radicaba la afinidad electiva
que cimentó la alianza entre el ya cincuentón Arana Goiri y el muchacho de veinte años”
(Bucle 221-2). Much later, when Txabi and his buddies from the Escolapios school align
themselves with the older Txillardegi as he initiates a split within ETA at the V Asamblea
in 1967, Juaristi says that the group “. . . parece estar representando un guión escrito por
otros . . .” (367). He implies that that script was written by Txillardegi when he speculates
about the boys’ “. . . incómoda sospecha de haber sido utilizados por Txillardegi” (368).
Despite their nagging suspicion, they follow Txillardegi’s lead, and in June of 1968 Txabi
becomes ETA’s first martyr. The etarras responsible for Miguel Ángel Blanco’s death in
1997 are similarly portrayed by Juaristi as mere puppets acting out “un guión que ha sido
escrito por otros hace ya mucho tiempo” (386). Finally, in La tribu atribulada, Juaristi
admonishes and disowns his father for leading him into nationalist activism (“Nuestros
padres mintieron: eso es todo.”) (9).
Juaristi further underscores the inward nature of Basque nationalism by detecting
its production and reproduction within a limited geographical space. He relates that Txabi
was born near Sabin Etxea (Sabino Arana’s birthplace) in the Abando neighborhood of
Bilbao, and then moved to the neighborhood in the city’s Old Town where Unamuno,
Gudari, the first lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre (1904-1960), and Juaristi were born,
concluding that “todas estas historias de melancholia se resumen en muy pocos metros”
(351). Here Juaristi insinuates that there is something about the specific setting of Bilbao
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that led these five men born decades apart from one another to contract the same
nationalist affliction. In the case of Unamuno, when he left Bilbao to study at the
University of Madrid, “el joven estudiante sufrió pasajeros accesos de melancolía . . .
Pero obró como contrapeso la agitación política e intelectual de la Corte . . . Era el
Madrid del krausismo y del positivismo, de los debates sobre Darwin. Ningún ingenuo
romanticismo podía resistir todo eso a la vez” (79). Madrid was a healthy space for
Unamuno to shed his melancholy, and he returned to Bilbao after completing his studies
more skeptical of the prevailing Aranist brand of nationalism (81-2). But, after teaching
for over two decades at the University of Salamanca, his exile to the French Basque
Country in 1924 during the Primo de Rivera regime caused an intellectual setback: “El
exilio hendayés le puso de nuevo en contacto prolongado con su pueblo de origen . . . El
pueblo vasco, el roble eterno, nunca abatido - como creyera en su adolescencia - , volvía
a surgir ante él en su ensoñación pastoral” (134). According to Juaristi, Unamuno’s
contact with Basque territory was enough to cause a relapse of adolescent melancholy in
the middle-aged man, while the Madrid-based dictatorial regime that harassed and exiled
him goes unmentioned. By attributing Basque nationalism solely to the “demonios
familiares” (335, 389) (a variation of “ancestral voices”) drifting about a haunted Basque
territory while portraying Madrid as a liberal space or omitting it altogether (including
from his autobiography, which ends not in the present, but in 1999 when Juaristi moved
from Bilbao to Madrid), Juaristi implies the Spanish State’s (symbolized by Madrid)
neutrality toward or absence from Basque politics. While the internal dynamics that
Juaristi painstakingly details from his privileged inside perspective are helpful in
identifying the roles played by local-level Basque politicians and intellectuals, he risks
losing site of the wider context in which they are embedded.
In contrast to Juaristi’s characterization of Basque nationalism as a family affair,
André Lecours traces its emergence and evolution in relation to the Spanish State in four
of its historical forms. He argues that the foral structure of the early Spanish State,
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beginning in the sixteenth century, favored local autonomy and identities; the fueros
lasted longer in the Basque provinces than anywhere else, fostering the notion of Basque
exceptionalism and especial valuing of autonomy. When after centuries of confederallike rule the Spanish State sought centralization in the nineteenth century, eliminating
Basque home rule, it was unsuccessful at transforming all Basques into Spaniards, and
instead sparked resistance - in the form of Basque nationalism - from the regional elites
who had benefited from the previous institutional structure. The pathway toward
nationalism in the Basque Country was further narrowed when the authoritarian state of
the twentieth century, coming off the heels of a democratic republic that was tolerant of
Basque autonomy, had the unintended effect of delegitimizing Spanish nationalism and
state centralization and triggering an association of peripheral nationalist movements with
democratic resistance, thereby increasing its popularity. Finally, Lecours explains that the
current democratic Estado de las Autonomías, which provides an institutional structure
that permits nationalist politics, continues to influence Basque nationalism through its
policies and actions, as could be seen during Aznar’s second term (2000-2004), when, as
Lecours maintains, the central government’s criminalization of and lack of dialogue with
nationalists generated increased polarization within the Basque Country (112-113).
Lecours, while recognizing the central role that individuals like Sabino Arana play in the
construction of nationalist narratives, also emphasizes that “their agency, and the extent
to which the larger targeted population will give credence to the nationalist doctrine is
heavily conditioned by the structure of the state and, more specifically the pattern of its
historical development” (12). In other words, in addition to the melancholy stemming
from personal losses and the demands of family ghosts, “. . . the state shapes the behavior
of social and political actors” (21).
The chapter of Basque history in which Juaristi played a part was a pivotal one,
for it features the emergence of a violent strain of nationalism that took the form of ETA.
Juaristi never denies that ETA came about as a reaction to Franco’s authoritarian state,
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even though he does understate the regime’s agency by depicting Basque nationalism as
an interfamilial inheritance and by asserting that Basques incurred the regime’s
oppression only because ETA succeeded to “arrancar al franquismo su máscara de
tolerancia y obligarle a descargar sobre las masas una violencia indiscriminada” (Bucle
329, italics mine). He does, however, deny the role that Franco’s legacy continues to play
in contemporary politics. For example, in his autobiography Juaristi tells that, “La
política no entraba en mis planes a largo plazo, pero me creía en la obligación de
contribuir al derribo del franquismo” (Cambio 211). Once this task was accomplished
and Francoism began to fizzle out in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Juaristi explains,
Basque nationalist and all other radical political movements should have disintegrated as
well; because they did not, they corrupted Basque society. He describes the Bilbao of the
late 1970s as a perverse and sick society characterized by “la socialización de la
violencia” (288). This is the same time that Juaristi himself became disenchanted with
political activism and Basque nationalism in particular, and also when a number of his
fellow non-nationalist phantoms (Luciano Rincón, Antonio Giménez Pericás, and Imanol
Larzábal) made similar transformations, following the lead of Gabriel Moral Zabala,
whom Juaristi lauds as “ . . . el primero de nosotros que pasó de la resistencia nacionalista
contra el franquismo a la resistencia democrática al totalitarismo” (Bucle 34). Juaristi’s
praise of his mentor reveals that for him Spain’s Transition to democracy also represents
Basque nationalism’s replacement of Francoism as an oppressive force, only Basque
nationalism is even worse than the authoritarian regime it replaces, for it has slid into
totalitarianism. This replacement of one oppressor for another requires that the first be
eclipsed by the second, hence Juaristi’s denial of Francoism’s relevance to contemporary
political debates and inheritance to the PP’s concept of Spanish identity, as I identify
above in my analysis of La tribu atribulada (La tribu 100, 158). Thus, Juaristi
paradoxically wipes the Spanish right-wing party directly descended from Francoism
clean of the dictatorship’s ideological legacy while identifying ETA as “. . . no . . .
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solamente un producto del franquismo, sino su degeneración más extrema,” suggesting
that the only remnant of Francoism left in Spain is embodied by Basque nationalism
(Juaristi, Contra 12).
This contention that ETA’s continued existence was the only failure of an
otherwise successful Transition to democracy and eradication of oppression in Spain
reveals Juaristi’s compliance with the official narrative of the Transition, a narrative that
José Colmeiro calls into question in his reflection on historical memory and ghosts in
contemporary Spain. Colmeiro interprets the increasingly prevalent trope of the ghost in
contemporary Spanish literature and film as a reflection of the fragmented, distorted, and
partially erased history lying beneath the veneer of official history, which presents the
Transition as a smooth shift to democracy through the complete erasure of the memory of
the Civil War and subsequent dictatorship. According to Colmeiro, the current polemics
surrounding the exhumation of the corpses of the victims of the war and the dictatorship a consequence of the approach taken by Spanish political institutions of burying the past
in order to ensure the success of the Transition (the Pacto de olvido) - reveal the spectral
nature of Spanish history. The bodies, though hidden underground in unmarked tombs,
haunt the present demanding justice; their “. . . posición liminar e invisible es una
metáfora adecuada de su estatus no existente en los márgenes de la historia oficial” (29).
He finds the ghostly narratives of many recent Spanish filmmakers and novelists a
healthy approach to dealing with these marginal, buried voices of history: “Estas
narrativas de la aparición hacen . . . visibles las desapariciones y ausencias silenciadas en
las versiones históricas normativas, y repite[n] el proceso de enfrentarse a un pasado
difícil que aún necesita ser tratado en el presente” (31). According to Isabel Cuñado,
Javier Marías is among those writers representing Spain’s traumatic recent past through
spectral fiction. She observes that Marías’s literary trajectory, which extends from the
Transition to the present, parallels Spanish society’s treatment of its past: “del
enterramiento inicial, al que sigue una larga etapa protagonizada por el retorno espectral
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del pasado, se pasa al reconocimiento de la violencia histórica a través de un relato
consciente” (28). Marías’s work, according to Cuñado, demonstrates that “convivir con
sus fantasmas es la única manera responsible de acercarse al pasado y, a su vez, de
enfrentarse al presente” (7). In contrast to the works praised by Cuñado and Colmeiro, the
ghosts of the Civil War and the dictatorship do not appear in Juaristi’s autobiography;
instead, he presents himself as a modern-day ghost of Basque nationalist oppression. As
he goes about portraying the Basque Country as a post-Transition totalitarian regime,
looking to Ireland, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union for comparisons, he effectively
erases the traces left behind by Francoism. As a result, Juaristi’s narrative, ghost-filled
though it may be, silences the ghosts of Spain’s traumatic past.
Wielding Symbolic Power
How can a narrative so preoccupied with ghosts be blind to those who became
specters during Spain’s rapid transition to democracy? Returning to Gordon can reveal
the answer to this question. Gordon proposes a transformation of sociological analysis
and the writing of “alternative stories” that permit it to fully take into account ghostly
social figures: “To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This
confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make
knowledge, in our mode of production” (Gordon 7). One aspect of the fundamental
change Gordon seeks involves tossing aside the empiricism and aspirations of objectivity
that distance the scholar from her subject of analysis. She calls for “making common
cause” with the stories we tell and “reckoning with how we are in these stories, with how
they change us, with our own ghosts” (21-2). Juaristi’s aforementioned shift away from
the traditional academic essay and toward autobiography in his treatment of Basque
nationalism, beginning with El bucle melancólico and culminating in Cambio de destino,
seems to resonate with Gordon’s proposal, for it entails implicating himself in his
analysis of Basque nationalism. However, Juaristi’s introduction to El bucle melancólico
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reveals that he only reluctantly gives up the traditional academic discourse of his prior
writings because such discourse fails to engage an irrational Basque nationalist reading
public. His endeavor into self-writing is his attempt to write like the nationalists do so as
to reach them:
Creo que hay que empezar a tomarse en serio tanto las historias de
los nacionalistas, por muy estúpidas que se nos antojen, como sus
exigencias de inteligibilidad autoexplicativa, porque tales son las
formas en que el nacionalismo se perpetúa y crece. La historia
académica, erudita y documentada, podrá satisfacer a un público
universitario . . . , pero no hace mella en las convicciones de la
mayoría de los votantes abertzales. (Bucle 27)
As Gabilondo explains, in El bucle melancólico Juaristi, who aligns himself with the
rational European modernity that he perceives in opposition to irrational Basque
nationalism, is forced to abandon his intellectual discourse and join the nationalists’
“fabricational act of narrating stories, as the only place left from which the denunciation
of nationalism can be carried out . . . .” (“Jon Juaristi: Compulsive Archaeology” 547). If
he identifies this new kind of storytelling with the nationalist irrationalism to which he is
opposed, it does not come as a surprise that he would embrace it only halfheartedly.
Hence, even as he takes up the allegedly nationalist writing style, he resists giving up his
academic authority: “… soy historiador que sigue creyendo en la superioridad de la
historia sobre las historias” (Bucle 29). Therefore, Juaristi, unlike the nationalists he
imitates, opts to “contar historias desde la historia … como las contaría un historiador
que pretendiera hacerlo no de forma empática y comprensiva, pero sí más o menos
participativa y razonable, ya que no ‘racional’” (29). This power to tell his stories with
the backing of historicity gives Juaristi an advantage over his nationalist opponents;
whereas the nationalists’ stories cause “significantes deletéreos” (18) when shared,
Juaristi’s stories are legitimized by his scholarly credentials. By falling back on his
privileged academic position as a means to qualify his and disqualify Basque nationalists’
stories, Juaristi undermines his attempt to write an alternative history of the Basque
Country that is open to its “ghostly aspects” (Gordon 7). He instead embodies what
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Gordon identifies as the academic’s limitations when it comes to ghostly matters:
“Bloodless categories, narrow notions of the visible and the empirical, professional
standards of indifference, institutional rules of distance and control, barely speakable
fears of losing the footing that enables us to speak authoritatively and with greater value
than anyone else who might” (21). Juaristi is unable to let go completely of his academic
authority in a way that would free him to write an alternative story like those of his
Basque nationalist counterparts.
Juaristi’s ability to speak authoritatively is derived from the cultural and symbolic
capital he possesses (to put it in the well-known terms of Pierre Bourdieu), the former
gained through his formal education and the experiences and environment of his
upbringing, and the latter through the institutions which grant him authority and on behalf
of which he speaks. In Cambio de destino Juaristi establishes his abundance of, and his
political opponents’ dearth of, cultural capital when he discusses his secondary education.
He compares Gaztelueta, a private Opus Dei-run school in Leioa that he attended, to San
Andrés, an ikastola (school with Basque-language instruction) in Sopelana where he
briefly taught much later. He maintains that Gaztelueta, far from forcing upon him a
conservative ideology, promoted independent thinking; it avoided “castigos colectivos”
and “se insistía más en la responsabilidad y en la capacidad de iniciativa personal que en
el control autoritario de los alumnos” (179). After recalling one overbearing professor,
José Manual Tapia, with whom he frequently quarreled, he quickly corrects, “No
quisiera, con todo, dar la impresión de que en Gaztelueta los profesores trataran de
imponernos sus ideas políticas. Esto no sucedía ni en el caso de Tapia…” (182). In
contrast, the abertzale teachers and parents of the San Andrés school derided divergent
ideologies, recalls Juaristi, resulting in the unjustified firing of Juaristi and his fellow
non-nationalist teachers and the molding of its students into etarras: “No sé cuantos
terroristas ha producido la ikastola de Sopelana en las tres décadas largas de su
existencia” (264-5). This portrayal of the San Andrés school recalls his depiction of
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Bilbao’s Escolapios school as an etarra factory in El bucle melancólico. In La tribu
atribulada a Jesuit-run school in the Indautxu neighborhood of Bilbao also comes under
scrutiny. Juaristi’s criticism of the Indautxu school comes in response to a comment made
by Juan Aranzadi, a former Indautxu student and professor of anthropology who once
collaborated with Juaristi before they parted ways ideologically. Aranzadi alleges that the
Opus Dei-approved curriculum and the upper-class social environment of Gaztelueta
played a role in Juaristi’s present-day conservative political stances. Juaristi rebuts in
defense of Gaztelueta: “Jamás tuve sensación de acoso político. La enseñanza, contra lo
que piensa Aranzadi, no se ajustaba en absoluto a un patrón nacionalcatólico” … “Los
profesores se comportaban con un exquisito respeto de las preferencias políticas de cada
alumno o, más exactamente, de las preferencias políticas familiares” (114). And he
follows up with an attack on Aranzadi’s school: “Cuando pienso lo que habría sido de mí
en un medio escolar como el descrito por Aranzadi al hablar de su colegio - todos de
familia nacionalista y, por si fuera poco, con los reverendos padres jesuitas arreándote
electrochoques de catolicismo social -, tiemblo como un diapasón con tercianas” (Tribú
117). Juaristi repeatedly asserts that while his political opponents’ schools brainwashed
them, inhibiting their intellectual development, Gaztelueta instilled in him the ability to
think independently and critically. The exchange between Aranzadi and Juaristi about
their schools, institutions which grant them some of their legitimacy as scholars, is
essentially a struggle between two social agents to claim a greater profit of cultural
capital in order to speak with greater authority than the other.
Accompanying his formal education, Juaristi accumulated additional cultural
capital by reading extensively on his own. For example, in his autobiography he recalls
reading Krutwig’s Vasconia (1963), a work that was greatly influential in ETA’s
ideological and strategic evolution, in particular its shift from the openly racial Aranist
nationalism to one based on language, as well as its alignment with national liberation
groups like the FLN and the Irgún in Algeria and Israel respectively, to justify its use of
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force in gaining independence from what it perceived as its Spanish colonizer (Elorza, La
historia 62-5). In spite of the book’s impact on the group’s actions, Juaristi claims he was
one of the only etarras to have read it (Juaristi, Cambio 120). Later, while completing his
required military service, Juaristi continued his intellectual growth by spending every free
moment reading, and he outgrew Krutwig’s theories: “En mi abandono de las engañosas
utopías políticas, tuvo su importancia este conjunto de lecturas de la mili” (259). He
distinguishes himself from the uneducated nationalists once more when he describes their
uninformed negative reactions to his anti-nationalist doctoral dissertation, El linaje de
Aitor: “En realidad, estoy convencido de que ninguno de aquellos miserables leyó el libro
y se despacharon con los insultos de rigor” (357). The knowledge that Juaristi gained
through reading grants his arguments greater authority than those of the unlettered
nationalists who disagree with him.
Another example of Juaristi’s delegitimization of nationalists who lack his
academic credentials occurs when he pokes fun at his grandfather’s explanation of the
etymology of their last name: “Mi abuelo, con sus pujos de hidalguía, lo consideraba
compuesto por juan (‘señor’) y aristi (‘robedal’): ‘Señor del Robledal’, nada menos.
Parece de Tolkien” (20). He then goes on to give his own more elaborate theory,
constructed from his knowledge as a trained linguist, concluding that “La realidad es más
prosaica o más mágica, dependiendo de cómo se mire” (20). The linguistic terminology
that Juaristi employs with ease and that gives his account legitimacy is a form of cultural
capital that his grandfather does not possess, and this capital allows Juaristi to stake a
claim to “reality” while relegating competing beliefs to the realm of fantasy. This
purported access to reality is problematized by Gordon, who defines the ghost story as a
“challenge to the monopolistic assumption that sociology can provide an unproblematic
window onto a more rather than less secure reality . . . ,” reminding us that “the real itself
and its ethnographic or sociological representations are also fictions, albeit powerful ones
that we do not experience as fictional, but as true” (Gordon 11). Again, even in his
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purportedly “alternative” story, Juaristi fails to give up his belief in his academic
perspective as the only possible “reality.”
While it is no difficult task for him to discount the arguments made by Basque
nationalists with less education than him, Juaristi’s approach is somewhat distinct when
confronted with recognized scholars with academic titles and university teaching
positions. In these cases, Juaristi delegitimizes the institutions which grant those scholars
their authority, exposing them as phony or amateur academics. In El bucle melancólico
he asserts that “Las distintas ramas del nacionalismo vasco carecen de historiadores
profesionales . . . ,” and as for the abertzales who attempt to debate non-nationalist
scholars, “No se trata de auténticos antropólogos ni sociólogos, sino de especialistas en la
denuncia ideológica” (Bucle 21). One way that he undermines the authenticity of
nationalist intellectuals is by implying that the nationalist-leaning faculty members of the
Universidad del País Vasco reached their positions by bypassing the proper channels. He
recalls that when the UPV’s Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y de la Información was
looking to fill a faculty opening, they made the hiring decision based on the faculty’s
favoritism, offering the position to an abertzale member of the department without a
doctorate instead of a high school teacher who did hold a doctoral degree (Sacra 273).
This questioning of the UPV’s professionalism is a tricky maneuver because, just like the
opponents he seeks to expose as false intellectuals, Juaristi taught there for several years.
He sidesteps this inconvenient fact by invoking his status as an outsider at the university.
He claims, for example, that while Emilio Barberá was the president of the UPV (19851991), he consistently sided with the abertzale faculty members whenever they had
conflicts with Juaristi (272). And in addition to their uneven share of university
administrative support, Juaristi notes that nationalist intellectuals enjoy subsidies from
the Basque government for the publication of their work (“el sobresueldo de los
turiferarios del PNV”) (233). On the whole, Juaristi expresses, in the sphere of
professional intellectuals, “los nacionalistas, por muy disidentes que se pretendan, juegan
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siempre con ventaja” (233). Because he did not benefit from the advantages given to his
abertzale colleagues in hiring and publication, Juaristi comes off as a self-made
intellectual whose professional successes are more deserved. Thus, the flaws (or
corruption) of the Basque institutions depicted by Juaristi, rather than compromise his
scholarly credentials, in fact enhance them, for he became a successful scholar in spite of
the disadvantages they posed for him.
Juaristi’s self-portrayal as a scholar independent and excluded from the
institutions upon which his abertzale counterparts rely contributes to his characterization
of himself as a ghostly figure. However, his ghostly nature is becomes questionable if one
considers the dominant position that he enjoys in the Spanish cultural field, as is
evidenced by his 1998 Premio Nacional de Ensayo for El bucle melancólico; his
appointment as the Cátedra Rey Juan Carlos I de España at New York University that
same year, as the director of the Biblioteca Nacional in 2000, and as the director of the
Instituto Cervantes in 2001; his current position as general director of the fifteen
Universities of the Community of Madrid (CAM); his regular column in the national
newspaper ABC; and the reviews of his literary publications that appear in the cultural
supplements of various newspapers. Along with his cultural capital, the distinctions
derived from these prizes, forums, and institutional affiliations grant Juaristi symbolic
power, or the power to speak authoritatively. While it appears that Juaristi has earned the
ability to speak with greater authority than his nationalist enemies by his own account,
Bourdieu observes that in fact “It is the access to the legitimate instruments of
expression, and therefore the participation in the authority of the institution, which makes
all the difference . . .” (Language 109). A key component of the profit of distinction,
though, is “the fact that it appears to be based on the qualities of the person alone” (73).
This is because symbolic power “is a power that can be exercised only if it is recognized,
that is, misrecognized as arbitrary” (170). The institutions providing Juaristi with
symbolic power are state-level institutions, as opposed to the regional-level Basque
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institutions that Juaristi criticizes. Their association with the long-standing Spanish nation
makes them more naturalized, or “misrecognized,” than institutions associated with
regional governments that have existed for only a few decades. But as Bourdieu reminds
us, even the most natural-seeming borders or classifications are “based on characteristics
which are not in the slightest respect natural and which are to a great extent the product
of an arbitrary imposition, in other words, of a previous state of the relations of power in
the field of struggle over legitimate delimitation” (Language 22). Yet in spite of its
arbitrarily gained authority, the perceived naturalness of the state gained over time
permits Juaristi to represent the institutionally backed power of his intellectual voice as
an unquestionable fact and his regionally aligned opponents’ as artificially constructed.
Given that Juaristi is affiliated with and supported by institutions of the Spanish
State (especially when those institutions are governed by the right-wing PP) it could still
be argued that Juaristi is treated like a ghost within the boundaries of a Basque Country
that seeks to distinguish itself from Spain. On the one hand, Juaristi does in a way
continue to haunt the Basque Country in his absence, riling up nationalists with his
provocative comments about them in the national press. On the other hand, Juaristi makes
his presence felt in the Basque Country through institutional channels; his publications
are available in public libraries and private bookstores, and his Basque-related public
statements are reported in the Basque press. Even Deia, the Vizcayan PNV-leaning
newspaper, and Gara, a bilingual daily from San Sebastian that is sympathetic to
abertzalismo, cover Juaristi’s remarks in editorials or reports. That they do so with a
critical slant does not negate the fact that they furnish Juaristi with a public platform in
the Basque Country for his pronouncements; even the negative reactions to Juaristi within
the Basque cultural field are indicative of his membership within that field. According to
Bourdieu, a field is a site of struggle in which its agents seek to either preserve or alter its
hierarchy of inclusion and rewards in the way that best matches up to the specific forms
of cultural capital they possess (The Field 30). Bourdieu considers anyone with the power
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to impact the field a member, even if she stirs up dissent from its other members: “There
is no other criterion of membership of a field than the objective fact of producing effects
within it,” for even “ . . . polemics imply a form of recognition; adversaries whom one
would prefer to destroy by ignoring them cannot be combated without consecrating
them” (42). Thus, whenever Basque nationalist journalists and scholars react to Juaristi’s
provocations, they admit him into their cultural field, perhaps inadvertently
“consecrating” and recognizing the symbolic authority of their adversary. Juaristi’s
position in the Spanish and Basque cultural fields contradicts his professed spectrality
and instead points to the symbolic power he wields within those fields.
Symbolic power is “ . . . a power of constituting the given through utterances, of
making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world
and, thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself. . .” (Bourdieu, Language 170).
In other words, for Bourdieu description is always prescriptive, in that what we choose to
call something affects how we perceive it, which then affects what that something
becomes, hence the importance of the struggle over classifications in the construction of
social reality (105). But not everyone possesses equal power to establish an accepted
vision of the world: “In the struggle to impose the legitimate vision . . . agents possess
power in proportion to their symbolic capital, i.e. in proportion to the recognition they
receive from a group” (106). Juaristi’s institutional validation in Spain and the Basque
Country provide him with the symbolic capital necessary to put forward a legitimated
vision of the Basque Country. In the next few pages I will show how he exploits this
capital to propose a vision of Basque nationalists, their language, and their cultural
production as deficient.
One way that Juaristi diminishes Basque nationalists, and by extension their
claims, is to assume the position of psychoanalyst and diagnose them with various
psychological maladies, the first being stunted adolescence. For example, when Jauristi
calls Sabino Arana “un adulto infantilizado a la perpetuidad” (Bucle 165), there is an
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insinuation that present-day nationalists, like their founder, also succumb to nationalism
due to their immaturity. Juaristi further secures this connection between Basque
nationalism and adolescence by means of the autobiographical genre. In Cambio de
destino, Juaristi projects his former immaturity onto the political movements to which he
once adhered. For example, he titles the chapter dedicated to his involvement in a Marxist
sector of ETA “Jugando a la lucha de clases,” depicting it as a childish game. He also
describes his former activism as a “fase” (258) through which he had to pass to reach his
current enlightenment, while those who remain trapped in that phase are cursed: “(L)a
eterna juventud es una maldición. Hay que envejecer: no sólo por imperativo biológico;
es también una obligación moral. La que yo tengo para con mis hijos, a los que debo
transmitir certezas y no confusión” (165-6). His first step in exiting his phase of Basque
nationalist fervor was turning fifteen, at which point he began to break free from the
family curse of his dead uncle Jon: “La sombra del tío Jon dejó entonces de pesar sobre
mí. Se escapó de repente, como la de Peter Pan, y no puse el menor esfuerzo en atraparla”
(17). His reference to Peter Pan implies that those who have not experienced an
ideological conversion like his own are stubbornly refusing to enter adulthood.
Autobiography is a vehicle for Juaristi to exploit his personal experiences as cultural
capital (his having been on the “other side” gives him authority to speak about it) and to
conflate his own “ridículas conspiraciones de adolescente” with a complex, multifaceted
identititarian and political situation (328).
Collective immaturity suggests underdevelopment and primitiveness. While
Juaristi’s use of terms like “mamones perpetuos” (77) characterizes peripheral
nationalisms as infantile, labels such as “la tribu” (357), “el clan” (81), and “Aztecas”
(329) indicates that they are uncivilized, pre-political communities unfit for modern
democratic self-governance. In fact, Juaristi suggests that the Basque Country is so
antithetical to modernity as to be immune to it, thanks to “ . . . la incorporación de
modernidad en dosis homeopáticas, lo que ha provocado siempre en sus receptores una
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saludable reacción contra la cultura de la modernidad, una producción masiva de
anticuerpos que neutralizan eficazmente los discursos críticos” (Bucle 19). As signaled by
his sarcastic use of medical terminology (“homeopáticas,” “saludable,” “anticuerpos”),
for Juaristi, the Basque pre-modern peripheral community and its anachronistic nationmaking efforts are not only out of place in twenty-first-century Europe; they are
unhealthy. In another example, he depicts his grandfather’s interest in his family tree as
an affliction: “el nacionalismo de mi abuelo Pablo representó, en tal sentido, una
inflexión: un síndrome regresivo que se manifestaba, por ejemplo, en la manía
genealógica” (Cambio 23). He also characterizes some Basques’ fear of the extinction of
their language as a disorder: “Un síndrome de solipsistas o de autistas lingüísticos, que
alguna vez llegaron a creerse, cada uno de ellos, el último hablante de la venerada lengua.
O el último vasco… Yo denominaría a este síndrome con el nombre y los apellidos del
primero que lo padeció. O sea, el Síndrome de Sabino Arana” (115). A variant of this
term is “el complejo del Último Euscaldún” (127). The premise of El bucle melancólico
is that a strain of collective melancholia plagues Basque nationalists in their entirety.
Following Freud’s definition of melancholia, Juaristi defines the Basque version of the
psychological disorder as “una denegación de la pérdida mediante una identificación del
sujeto con el objeto perdido,” the lost object in this case being an imaginary fatherland
(Bucle 47). He warns that this melancholia “se contagia a través del discurso” (31).
Elsewhere, Juaristi calls nationalism “el gonococo abertzale,” a disease that “vuelve tonta
a la gente” (128). Due to its “gran riesgo de contagio,” his recommendation is to
quarantine them from the public by cutting off their access to the media: “Hasta que no se
invente la vacuna adecuada, los periodistas deberían evitar contactos sexuales con
miembros de la Tribu” (La tribu 128). By diagnosing nationalists with collective
illnesses, Juaristi establishes his own position of authority over them, like that of the
clear-minded clinician over his irrational or sick patients. Their unbalanced mental state,
as it is constituted by Juaristi, automatically disqualifies them from expressing legitimate
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political agency. In an example of apparent incongruity, when citing UPV philosophy
professor Joxe Azurmendi’s (1941) likening of the Basque Country to an identitarian
hospital20, Juaristi disparages the use of such language: “Desconfío de las metáforas
clínicas. Las suelen emplear, por lo general, individuos que creen saber qué es lo sano y
qué es lo enfermo, lo normal y lo patológico en la vida de las sociedades” (Sacra 280).
Juaristi exerts his authority to safely handle metaphors that become dangerous in the
hands of nationalist scholars.
Juaristi’s claim to scientific authority and his characterization of nationalism as
immature and primitive further problematize the ghostly nature of Juaristi’s narrative. In
her discussion of the limitations of psychoanalysis in its treatment of ghostly matters,
Gordon laments that Freud, after opening the door to ghosts as valid object of study (e.g.,
examining how things which originate outside of consciousness materialize as symptoms
and disappear through repression), slammed it shut in his efforts to gain recognition for
psychoanalysis as a legitimate science: “After having dragged the human sciences into all
these ghostly affairs, Freud’s science arrives to explain away everything that is important
and to leave us with adults who never surmount their individual childhoods or adults
whose haunting experiences reflect their incorrect and childish belief in the modes of
thought of their ‘primitive’ ancestors” (Gordon 57). In his dismissal of Basque
nationalism as a symptom of stunted adolescence, misguided primitive beliefs, or
insanity, Juaristi makes Freud’s mistake of closing his narrative off from the ghosts.
Anachronism is, after all, the defining characteristic of the ghost; as Buse and Stott
explain, haunting always results in the deformation of linear temporality, for it involves a
figure from the past emerging in and impacting the present (1). Because of this,
traditional historicity is threatened by rather than welcoming of the spectral (16-7). Along
20 “Euskal Herria es hoy un hospital de conciencias. La mayoría somos pedazos: medio
euskaldunes, tres cuartos de euskaldunes.” From Los españoles y los euskaldunes. Fuenterrabía:
Hiru, 1995. Page 522.
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this line Buse and Stott also maintain that although the Enlightenment strove to draw a
line between the rational and the “shadowy others” (witchcraft, irrationality, superstition)
pertaining to socially marginalized groups, it failed to fully exorcise the ghosts; hence
Enlightement reason continues to be haunted by what it excludes (3-5). When Juaristi
stakes claim to modernity and scientific reason by dismissing Basque identity as
primitive and adopting medical terminology in his diagnosis of what he views as Basque
nationalist irrationality, he further marginalizes, as opposed to engaging with, the ghosts
that haunt his rationalist narrative.
Juaristi wears many hats; not only does he perform a psychoanalysis of Basque
nationalists, but, as a linguist, he also judges the value of the Basque language and the
work performed by other linguists on its behalf, such as priest, writer, and former
Escolapios teacher Justo Mocoroa’s (1901-1990) dictionary of Basque idioms:
A Mocoroa le dispensaron, en 1963, de sus labores docentes para
que se dedicase a su trabajo de recolección de idiotismos vascos. A
su muerte dejó 96.000 fichas con más de 200.000 locuciones de
todos los dialectos del eusquera. Una obra admirable; sobre todo,
por su perfecta inutilidad: el ectoplasma de un objeto nunca
perdido, de una lengua que seguiría produciendo y destruyendo
modismos, como todas las lenguas, sin que ello tenga la menor
relevancia para la perduración de estas. (Bucle 356-7)
That Juaristi deems pointless a project that records a language’s history in an effort to
preserve it in the future contradicts his recent participation in a workshop on the future of
Spanish in which he celebrates the maintenance of a "jubilosamente unido y sólido”
Spanish language in spite of the rapidly changing technologies of the internet era (qtd. in
“Juaristi”). In his talk he reportedly emphasizes the importance that Antonio de Nebrija’s
grammar (1492) had in the survival and extension of Spanish in comparison to other
languages of the Iberian Peninsula, hence recognizing the role that linguists play in
constraining a language’s evolution (“Juaristi”). As Bourdieu explains, the standard,
“correct” form of a language is maintained by the educators and grammarians who codify
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rules which dictate future linguistic production and which are themselves based upon past
linguistic production (Language 61).
Why Juaristi would criticize efforts to record the Basque language of a particular
time and place while taking for granted the value of similar activities in Spanish has
everything to do with timing. In an article dealing with the role that academics play in
perpetuating the same ideologies that they seek to objectively analyze, Antón Figueroa
argues that the dominant interpretation of Spain’s history has legitimized centralist
nationalism, giving it the appearance of “common sense,” while portraying peripheral
versions of nationalism as contrived and unsupported by historical fact. He blames this
process of de-legitimization of peripheral nationalism on the notion that they are
developing outside of the appropriate historical period for nation-building: the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Any attempt to establish a new national identity is perceived as
anachronistic and forced (209). A crucial aspect of nation-building is linguistic
unification and homogenization. Because this process began in Spanish with Nebrija’s
grammar centuries before the unification of a written form of Basque, it no longer comes
under question. In Basque, on the other hand, these processes are still not normalized and
are therefore more apparent. For example, Juaristi notices the new Basque first names
that gained popularity after the dictatorship: “En los primeros años de la Transición,
muchos vascos cambiaron sus nombres oficiales ‘castellanos’ por sus correspondientes
eusquéricos o seudoeusquéricos… en la mayoría, primó el esnobismo o el mimetismo
nacionalista” (Cambio 17). He then contrasts his recently invented Basque name, Jon,
with the time-honored name that he bestowed upon his son, Martín:
Cuando decidí llamar Martín a mi primer hijo, no faltó quien me
reprochara darle un nombre maketo, teniendo aquél primos de su
misma edad que llevaban otros tan vascos como Kepa o Alain. De
nada servía explicarles que el primero de éstos era una invención
nacionalista reciente, con menos de un siglo de existencia…
mientras que Martín fue el nombre de la mayoría de los varones
vascos desde la llegada del cristianismo hasta la difusión de la
religión abertzale. (18)
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For Juaristi the long history of the name Martín accords it worth that newer names lack.
What bothers Juaristi about the new Basque names besides their artificiality is that they
were invented for openly patriotic purposes. Likewise, Juaristi is repelled by efforts to
learn Basque for patriotic reasons: “ . . . uno puede acercarse a un idioma por multitud de
razones (por extrañeza o admiración ante su estructura o su fonética, por deseo de
acceder a la cultura que la utiliza como medio de expresión, o incluso por puro
pasatiempo). El motivo patriótico no es algo natural, como los nacionalistas sostienen”
(Bucle 195). Juaristi, as he declares in an ABC column entitled “Amateurismo,” considers
Basque a mere hobby and urges Basque nationalists to stop taking the language so
seriously: “Nunca es más grotesco el nacionalismo que cuando se reviste del espíritu de
la seriedad.” Juaristi writes the column in response to nationalists’ demands to remove
him from the Consejo Asesor del Eusquera (a government-sponsored organization which
oversees efforts to expand the use of Basque, or “linguistic normalization”) due to his
comment during a Radio Euskadi interview that, “El eusquera no es mi lengua. Su futuro
me resulta indiferente” (qtd. in “Amateurismo”). He recommends to the outraged
nationalists that they also embrace his approach of studying Basque “por afición y sólo
por afición”: “Se trata de que aprendan a estimar las virtudes del amateurismo.” He
reasons that since his knowledge of Basque earns him no material gains (“Al eusquera . .
. nunca le he sacado un céntimo”), his only motive for participating on the Council is “ . .
. porque me divierte chinchar. Insisto: me divierte.” The flippant remarks of the ABC
piece lie in stark contrast to the serious tone Juaristi adopts in “El Instituto Cervantes y el
hispanismo.” In this article, written during his tenure as director of the Instituto
Cervantes, Juaristi praises the work of hispanists throughout the world, thanks to whom
Spanish has become a “lengua de prestigio internacional” (260). But even more
importantly, Juaristi credits hispanists for giving Spain’s international image a facelift.
He explains that after a period of isolation from intellectual movements abroad, Spain,
largely due to the Romantics’ portrayals, came to be perceived as an exotic nation with a
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passionate, as opposed to intellectual, culture. The hispanists who stepped in to counter
this stereotype “nos ayudaron a que otras naciones vieran más de cerca y . . . a que se
hiciera otro juicio sobre nosotros” (261). Juaristi concedes here that the study of the
Spanish language and Spanish-language cultural production play a key role in Spain’s
efforts to project a particular international image. The fact that he labels this effort “una
tarea inacabada” that will continue thanks in part to the Instituto Cervantes’ upcoming
projects reveals Juaristi’s admission that the maintenance of a particular Spanish identity
requires perpetual upkeep in the form of the labor undertaken by intellectuals. And his
writing of the article is evidence of Juaristi’s own participation in the preservation of the
international prestige of not only the Spanish language21, but of a traditional definition of
the Spanish nation.
This fact calls into question Jauristi’s proposal that Basque be somehow stripped
of its patriotic dimensions and treated as a mere hobby. His praise of hispanists’ work as
prestigious (he uses this descriptor several times in the “Instituto Cervantes” article) and
encouragement to Basque-language philologists to resign themselves to amateurism
suggest a hierarchy of languages in which Spanish reigns supreme. This is evidenced in
Juaristi’s classification of post-Aranist Basque as jargon. Because Arana did a poor job in
his efforts to restore and establish a written form of Basque in the late nineteenth century,
Juaristi says he ended up with “Una jerga con todas las de la ley: es decir, un léxico
especial, y, en ese sentido, no muy distinta de las muchas jergas de oficio que aún
subsistían en la España de la época . . .” (Bucle 197). He supports this classification by
pointing out that many of the words introduced by Arana lack referentiality outside of the
Basque Country: “Ikurriña no equivale a bandera, ni lehendakari a presidente, ni
ertzantza a policía, ni jaurlaritza a gobierno” (197). The argument that its vocabulary
21 While the mission of the Instituto Cervantes (as it appears on its website) is to
“promocionar el español y las lenguas cooficiales de España,” Juaristi’s article discusses only
Spanish (http://www.cervantes.es/sobre_instituto_cervantes/informacion.htm).
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lacks universality implies that Basque is a limited vehicle of expression compared to
other languages. Furthermore, by minimizing the Basque language, Juaristi deprives
nationalists of a defining element of their identity; if the Basque language is only a
jargon, if follows that Basque identity is just a fad with an insignificant number of
followers. Thus, Juaristi’s linguistic analysis serves to maintain not only the dominance
of Spanish language over the other languages of the Peninsula, but also of Spanish
identity over peripheral national identities.
If in the estimation of Juaristi as linguist Basque is an inferior language, if follows
that Juaristi as writer and literary critic would view Basque literary production similarly.
He rejects the notion, for example, that Francoist censorship and policies repressing the
Basque language may have stifled Basque cultural production, suggesting an inherent
lack of creative energy there irrespective of politics: “El mito de las grandes energías
creadoras aherrojadas por el franquismo se vino abajo en poco tiempo. No había siquiera
una gran figura del exilio que avivara, con su presencia, los improbables rescoldos del
genio local. Celaya y Otero, en Madrid, no mostraban gran prisa por disputarse la cima
del Parnaso vasco, un monte más bajito que el Igueldo” (Cambio 290). According to
Juaristi, the only post-war Basque writers worth mentioning wrote in Spanish and were
based in Madrid; the Basque Country was a creative vacuum. For this reason, Juaristi
deems the work that Krutwig, Aresti, and fellow philologist Xabier Kintana Urtiaga
(1946) to uncover a Basque literary tradition a waste of their talents: “ . . . pienso que lo
que malogró el talento de los tres, de Krutwig, Aresti y Kintana, fue su nacionalismo: la
obsesión por hacer respetable una tradición intelectual muy modesta, para decirlo
caritativamente, convirtiendo en canon las nimiedades más absurdas” (268). He notes that
the three scholars were well educated; between the three of them they knew German,
Sanskrit, Greek, French, English, and the languages of the Caucasus, and “sabían mucho
de literatura e historia española” (267). For Juaristi, while their knowledge of these
languages and literary traditions demonstrate their scholarly potential, their choice to
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instead focus on a bankrupt Basque-language tradition is senseless, again implying a
language heirarchy that disesteems Basque.
Extending his portrait of the Basque Country as a cultural void into the present
day, Juaristi discounts the literary contributions of his contemporary Bernardo Atxaga
(1951), the Basque-language novelist whose masterpiece Obabakoak, after being
translated into more than twenty languages and winning the 1989 Premio Nacional de
Literatura, brought international recognition to Basque literature. He does so by
attributing Atxaga’s success to his marketing abilities (“Bernardo es un gran vendedor de
crecepelo”) as opposed to the quality of his writing, in which he observes an abuse of
pastiche and “amplificaciones tediosas” (292-3). Juaristi’s assessment suggests that the
broad readership of Atxaga’s work is incompatible with aesthetic quality. This opposition
of commercial success and aesthetic excellence is central to the logic of the literary field,
which, according to Bourdieu, tends to reward (in the form of prestige) that production
which is most autonomous from the logic of the economic and political fields (Field 3940). This autonomy from economic and political gains, which gives the consecrated work
the appearance of having sprung solely from individual creative genius, conceals the
struggles within the field for the power to determine what constitutes a legitimate writer
and literary product. Bourdieu insists that literary legitimacy means possessing the power
“to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the
writer” (42). Juaristi asserts his authority as a recognized poet (poetry generally
considered among the most prestigious of literary genres) to exclude Atxaga and other
Basque writers from the field of cultural production based on what appear to be purely
aesthetic principles, but which are in fact political.
Another example of this comes when, after observing that his family is composed
of many capable artists and musicians who nevertheless lack creative genius, he extends
this phenomenon to the Basque Country as a whole. He wonders about the cause of this
absence of what he calls “verdadera energía creativa, eso que suele llamarse el genio”
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and which is “muy extendido en el país vasco (sic)”: “Quizas se deba precisamente a la
fuerza de la tradición menestral, que estimula, por una parte, las inclinaciones artísticas y,
por otra, las limita o nivela. Alguna vez he sostenido que algo semejante ha ocurrido con
la literatura eusquérica, y no creo que sea una tesis enteramente desacertada” (33).
According to Juaristi, this “querencia por lo artesanal” (33) was magnified by the lateand post-Francoist folk artists whose work was inspired by popular culture; instead of
making aesthetic innovations, this generation “chapoteábamos en las aguas estancadas”
of the Arts and Crafts movement, “que tanta fiebre tifoidea habían provocado en la
Bilbao de Unamuno y Sabino Arana” (34). By overrating popular, artisan traditions, they
trapped themselves in the past. Though Juaristi limits his critiques to aesthetic
considerations, it is not coincidental that the 1960-70s folk movement, represented by
musicians such as José Antonio Labordeta, Raimon, and Mikel Laboa, who formed part
of the Nueva Canción Española, the Catalan Nova Cançó, and the Nueva Canción Vasca,
respectively, was associated with progressivism and the resurgence of Catalan and
Basque national identities. By finding their inspiration in popular culture, these artists
sought to engage with the socioeconomically or culturally marginalized groups to whom
this culture pertained. When Juaristi demeans the Basque folk tradition for its lack of
“true creative energy,” he excludes it from the category of legitimate creative production.
This exclusion, according to Jo Labanyi, forms part of what she calls the ghost
story of modern Spanish culture: “critical writing on modern Spanish culture, by largely
limiting itself to the study of ‘high culture’ (even when the texts studied are noncanonical), has systematically made invisible – ghostly – whole areas of culture which
are seen as non-legitimate objects of study because they are consumed by subaltern
groups” (1). She identifies this “process of rendering ghostly those areas of culture
consumed by ‘history’s losers’” (2) as fundamental to the making of the modern Spanish
nation, noting that foreign perceptions of Spanish popular culture as exotic led to an
association of popular culture with archaism and a consequent backlash against it: “The
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more Spaniards have felt that they are seen as cultural inferiors, the more they have
stressed the importance of high culture . . .” (10). This is consistent with the concerns
Juaristi’s expresses in “El Instituto Cervantes y el hispanismo” regarding Spain’s
international image and sense of belonging to the European intellectual tradition. By
suggesting that Basque artists are incapable of producing “high art,” Juaristi shifts the
accusations of cultural inferiority and pre-modernity to Spain’s periphery, namely the
Basque Country. In light of Labanyi’s designation of popular cultural forms in Spain as
ghostly, Juaristi’s dismissal of the folk movement from the category of genuine art is
further proof that, far from disappearing into spectrality, he in fact wields his symbolic
power to render others ghostly.
The Woman as Ghost
The type of popular cultural production that Juaristi finds diametrically opposed
to “creative genius” is traditionally associated with the feminine. This connection comes
to light in Cambio de destino when Juaristi recalls his great-aunt Pepita, who told stories
and taught him songs from her childhood. As the “última liberal de la familia” (32),
Pepita, who had lived through the Sexenio Revolucionario (1868-1873), the six-year
liberal democratic period preceding the first Bourbon Restoration in Spain, still
remembered the liberal militia’s hymn, and her stories played a decisive role in shaping
Juaristi’s knowledge of and affinity for nineteenth-century history. However, after
recognizing the importance of oral transmission of popular songs and stories in his own
intellectual formation, in the same breath he begins his discussion of the lack of creative
genius in Basque cultural production due precisely to the weight of the popular tradition
represented by Pepita. It is no coincidence that it is Pepita, one of the few female relatives
Juaristi portrays in his autobiography, who exposes him to the popular culture he later
dismisses. Labanyi notes that one of the perceived deficiencies of mass and popular
culture is its “contamination of the feminine” (3), the reason for which popular culture’s
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appropriation by intellectuals is often accompanied by a “masculinization of the medium”
(3). Mari Cruz Garrido Pascual, in her assessment of the historical repression of popular
cultural forms in Spain, would also add patriarchal censure. Garrido traces the evolution
of the corro22 from Antiquity to present-day Spain and performs close readings of the
corro songs she collects from living subjects in La Rioja. She argues that the corro, with
its accompanying cancionero (collection of popular folk songs), functioned historically
as a collective, inclusive space where women momentarily escaped, and at times even
denounced, the bounds of patriarchy, making it a target of repression that has all but
eliminated it:
Me es especialmente gratificante detenerme y observar el juego del
corro como espacio de expresión de la alegría y vitalidad
femenina, como un lugar de libre actuación, que fue en el pasado
sitio de extraordinaria actividad lúdica, ritual y sexual, y que la
cultura patriarcal, a lo largo de los siglos, ha ido moldeando,
reprimiendo y acotando para quedar finalmente reducido a un
espacio mínimo infantil. (12-13)
In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, the state distributed an official song
collection to be taught in schools23 which censured the popular corro versions, altering
their content so as to eliminate the subversive and sometimes risqué messages while
replacing them with moralizing, patriarchal ones. These new versions, “tras un baño de
‘purificación’” (112), were taught in school with varying degrees of success. Garrido
observes that these blatant examples of reproach of feminine creative expression were
accompanied by another more subtle and effective form of censure: dismissal. Like
Labanyi, she notes how valued forms of culture have come to be associated exclusively
22 At its origins a gathering of women - though nowadays it consists most often of
children - where they form a circle, join hands, sing, and dance. An example of a corro song in
the English-language tradition is “Ring Around the Rosie.”
23 El cancionero infantil by José Grimaud (1865). Its title page reads: “Colección de
cantares escritos con arreglo a las músicas que las niñas cantan en el corro. Obra declarada de
texto para la lectura por el Real Consejo de Instrucción Pública para su distribución en escuelas”
(qtd. in Garrido 110-11).
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with written literature: “El viejo esquema patriarcal bipolar, jerárquico y excluyente que
rige nuestro mundo nos ha hecho creer que la cultura escrita es la que tiene valor; incluso
nos ha dicho que esa es la única cultura” (Garrido 127). That the linking of “real”
literature with written production is a symptom product of patriarchy is evidenced by
Garrido’s observation that even as scholars, beginning with Menéndez Pidal, began to
appreciate oral cultural production as worthy of analysis, the female protagonists of this
tradition faded into the background. She notes that due to the use of common phrasing
such as “oral tradition educated children…” instead of “women educated children
through the oral tradition which they formed and perpetuated,” women’s agency is
eclipsed in many studies of oral literature. They are frequently treated as background
characters marginalized within the analyses of the songs (10-11). The consequence of the
devaluation of female cultural practices and erasure of their agency in these practices is
women’s increasing alienation from their formerly central role in the transmission of
knowledge. Garrido, quoting scholar Dolores Juliano, points out that through processes of
modernization, the traditional forms of knowledge possessed and transmitted by women
were deemed superstitious and backward while men appropriated a monopoly over the
forms of knowledge considered prestigious and maintained that monopoly through the
education system (121). Therefore, when Juaristi devalues cultural production in the
Basque Country for relying too heavily on popular tradition, he implicitly contributes to
the repudiation of women’s contributions – such as his Aunt Pepita’s – to Basque cultural
production and transmission. And when he stakes a claim to authority over “good”
literature, he is exploiting his position within a patriarchal structure that advantages the
literary tradition with which he aligns himself and which has demonstrated a historical
tendency to close off women’s agency in the production and transmission of knowledge.
That women are deprived of epistemic authority within the intellectual system to
which Juaristi adheres is made apparent by the virtual absence of reference to female
scholars, artists, or public figures in his large body of work. When he does on extremely
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rare occasions mention in passing a female scholar or feminist scholarship, his language
is dismissive. For example, he only touches upon the role of the feminist movement in
the evolution of abertzalismo as a brief aside in his discussion of the resurgence of
Basque mythology: “La vindicación de las brujas vascas, por ejemplo, llegó a ser uno de
los motivos centrales del feminismo abertzale, pero todos los feminismos andaban
entonces desenterrando causas parecidas en los libros de la Murray y de Robert Graves”
(Bucle 305, italics mine). With this remark, Juaristi reduces Western second-wave
feminism, a multi-faceted and geographically dispersed political and intellectual
movement, to a silly obsession with witches and mythological figures. His use of the term
“desenterrando causas” hints at the irrelevance in the present day of feminists’ interest in
the history of women’s oppression. And his linking of all feminists to whom he earlier
refers to as “la desorientadísima Margaret Murray” (304), the British anthropologist
whose theory of a pre-Christian matriarchal culture is widely rejected by historians and
anthropologists today, he discredits the entire feminist movement based on one feminist’s
work while either misunderstanding or glossing over the symbolic function of some
second-wave feminists’ re-appropriation of the witch as a way to establish their own
interpretation of a female figure historically defined by oppressive male authority.
Finally, Juaristi’s use of the definite article la before Murray’s surname subtly diminishes
the female scholar. Though the use of the definite article before names is common in the
colloquial usage of some Spanish dialects (this is not common practice in Spanishspeakers of the Basque Country), the fact that he never once employs this same structure
in the masculine form (“el” before a man’s last name) shows that it functions here to
“gender” Murray in comparison to the neutral, genderless portrayal of the male scholars
who dominate Juarist’s oevre.
Another example of Juaristi’s gendering of the scarcely few women scholars who
appear fleetingly in his work happens in Cambio de destino when he recalls a
disagreement over an exam that he had with María Luisa López, at the time a new
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professor at the University of Deusto when he was a doctoral student there. Juaristi does
not treat López any more kindly than Murray, describing her as “un prodigio de
incompetencia y resentimiento” who was working on “una absurda tesis” (248).
Mirroring the demeaning wording of his reference to Murray in El bucle melancólo, he
calls her “la López” while within the same discussion referring to one of López’s male
colleagues by his surname alone (259). Even more glaring, though, is Juaristi’s depiction
of López’s behavior during their argument as hysterical: “Me ordenó, con gritos
histéricos, que saliera de su despacho” (248). The centuries-long history of the
construction of hysteria as a feminine disorder is well known. While hysterical
symptoms, along with doctors’ interpretations of and hypothesized causes of them, varied
over time, the etymology of the word (hystera means “uterus” in Greek) makes it
inseparable from womanhood. Thus, even in the present-day, “hysterical” continues to be
a commonplace descriptor for a woman who is perceived to be overly emotional,
impulsive, or infantile, from a comparatively detached, composed, and presumedly male,
perspective. Elaine Showalter looks at the treatment of and discourses surrounding the
oft-forgotten male hysterics from the seventeenth century to the present, revealing how
doctors scrambled to attribute hysteria-like symptoms in men to distinctly male disorders,
such as melancholy, hypochondria, neurasthenia, and shell shock, thus always
maintaining a gender-based definition of hysteria (289-292). If the diagnoses varied
between women and men who displayed the same symptoms, their treatments often did
as well; men, for example, were not submitted to the “rest cure” so common at the turn of
the century, which was based on the notion that intellectual labor sapped a woman’s
reproductive energy and which consisted in complete dominance of the male therapist
over the female hysteric (294-300). A key source of that domination, besides the
inhibiting physical space occupied by the hospitalized hysteric, explains Showalter, was
the psychoanalyst’s power to tell the hysteric’s story. She cites Freud’s assertion in
“Studies on Hysteria” that the hysteric’s inability to tell a coherent, intelligible narrative
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of her own life required the analyst to construct one for her, impose it upon her, and
convince her of its truth as the only path to a cure (318). And she also notes how, starting
at the time of the suffragist movements, activist and feminist women have often been
portrayed by reactionaries as hysterics so as to call attention to the danger of female selfassertion (306, 320). Showalter aims to highlight, rather than the etymological link
between “hysteria” and hystera, the connection between “hysteira” and histoire:
“Hysteria is no longer a question of the wandering womb, it is a question of the
wandering story, and of whether that story belongs to the hysteric, the doctor, the
historian, or the critic” (335). For Showalter, the incoherence of the hysteric’s narrative
results from her powerlessness to impose the connections within and interpretation of her
own story to others. When Juaristi characterizes his former professor’s utterances as
hysterical, he taps into a long-standing tradition of silencing women’s expression. By
diagnosing López as hysterical, he establishes a power dynamic between himself as cool,
controlled analyst and López as unhinged patient, effectively wiping out her superiority
over him as his professor by trumping it with his male authority.
After his deployment of a hysteria diagnosis to disqualify a woman’s voice,
Juaristi paradoxically likens himself to the mythological prophet Cassandra as he relates
how his fellow Basques not only failed to take heed of his warning that ETA would
renege on its 1999 ceasefire, but turned against him, forcing him to flee the region: “La
vieja historia de Casandra. . . No digo que todo el país deseara matar al mensajero, pero
no veía a mucha gente dispuesta a impedirlo” (Cambio 390). Cassandra, to whom Apollo
grants the gift of prophecy with the accompanying curse of the inability to convince
others to believe her predictions, fails to prevent the destruction of her native Troy at the
hands of the Greeks. She is thus seized by Agamemnon as a spoil of war24, and upon
arriving to Agamemnon’s palace foresees both their murders at the hands of Clytemnestra
24 She laments this situation in Euripides’ Trojan Women (415 BCE).
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and Aegisthus25. With his illusion to Cassandra, Juaristi underscores the tragic
determinism of recent Basque history to which he fell victim when ETA silenced and
banished him with the complicity of the same people he aimed to protect by sharing his
knowledge. Like Cassandra, he presents himself as possessing a privileged knowledge of
Basque history and special insight into its future. And just like Trojan Cassandra in the
eyes of the Greeks, to Basque nationalists Juaristi is an outsider, a non-citizen.
With this comparison, however, Juaristi ignores the essential role that Cassandra’s
gender plays in her plight. Most obvious is the fact that Apollo’s curse upon her is a
reaction to her rejection of his sexual advances, the tragic irony of this resistance to a
powerful male figure being that upon the Greeks’ taking of Troy, Oilean Ajax rapes her
in Athena’s temple and Agamemnon abducts (and presumedly also rapes) her. Yet
beyond the events that occur in Cassandra’s story, the way in which she tells her story
reveals a great deal about how her condition as a woman governs her access to
knowledge and her lack of authority in transmitting it to others. As a number of feminist
classicists have illuminated, Cassandra’s speech takes on two forms which the Greeks
associated with the feminine: lament, and Pythia-like ambiguity. The lament, exemplified
by Cassandra’s (and all of the other female characters’) speech in Trojan Women, is,
according to Ann Suter’s analysis of the Euripidian tragedy, a “female genre par
excellence” (18) and “the one place where, traditionally, (women) spoke with power, and
were heard” (18). However, as Helene P. Foley’s important study of female acts in Greek
tragedy reminds us, all evidence shows that even if there were females present in the
audience, Greek tragedy was written by and for men (3). And in spite of the power of
some of the dissenting female laments in Greek tragedies, especially in contrast to actual
Attic women’s utter exclusion from public discourse, Casey Dué’s take on tragic lament
25 This scene is portrayed in Agamemnon, the first play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy
(458 BCE).
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finds that patriarchal order tends to be reasserted in the end (22-3). Thus, feminist
Classics scholars concur that the female voice in Greek tragedy served as a vehicle for
men, whether it be to render alterity (Dué 5-6), to explore issues they were uncomfortable
expressing through their own, male persons (Foley 4, Suter 18), or as a rite of initiation
for the pre-citizen adolescent boy actors who played the female characters (Dué 25).
If the female characters in Greek tragedy served as vehicles for men’s speech and
issues, so did the Pythias, the prophetesses at Delphi who spoke Apollo’s oracles. As Lisa
Maurizio explains in her exploration of the Pythia’s speech, “The emphasis of most
oracular tales is on the client’s ability to interpret his oracle and thereby communicate
with Apollo. The Pythias were simply faithful translators of Apollo who enabled a
conversation, if not a contest, between male clients and a male god . . .” (44). The need
for male interpretation was ensured by the ambiguity of the language employed by the
Pythias, a style Maurizio identifies as linked to the feminine in the Greek male
imagination and through which the Pythias’ made their speech acceptable - even
authoritative - to the archaic Greek men who believed it actually to be Apollo’s speech
(40-41). The Pythias, then, much like female tragic characters, served as a vehicle for
communication between males, or as Laurie Layton Schapira describes it, as “a sacred
vessel for the god” (17). Schapira and Maurizio agree that this vessel-like function of the
Pythias was connected to the idea of a womb; the Pythia’s were understood as Apollo’s
wives, their divinations as impregnations by the god, and their “oracles as the legitimate
offspring of their sexual union with Apollo” (Maurizio 46-8). As the Pythias’ authority to
speak hinges upon their relationship with Apollo, Cassandra’s prophecies are
delegitimized for her “refusal of the Pythia’s position as fecund wife” for which Apollo
wanted her (50). Thus, Cassandra’s ambiguous ravings are perceived by those around her
as, in the words of Oresteia editor Christopher Collard, “almost schizoid (we might say)
as she alternates between pathetic victim and manically assertive seer,” (xxviii). This
description of Cassandra’s volatile behavior recalls the two-sided portrait of the hysteric,
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which at certain historical moments encapsulated both the helpless, childlike housewife
and the overly aggressive feminist. Schapira weaves an elaborate web tying Cassandra as
failed Pythia to the hysteric. She points out the centrality of the uterus as a defining
element of both figures (17) and that the origin of the term “vapors” used in reference to
hysteria harks back to the vapors that were believed to rise from the chasm at Delphi
inspiring the Pythias’ divinations (41), revealing the link in Western collective
imagination between the Pythia’s - and Cassandra’s - prophetic trance and the hysteric
episode. This connection is made more apparent by French psychotherapist Pierre
Janet’s26 (1859-1947) proposal to rename hysteria “pithiatisme,” the roots of which are
pietho, meaning “I persuade,” and iatos, or “curable” (46-47). As Schapira points out,
this lack of power to persuade is the key link between Cassandra and the hysteric; the
male psychoanalyst with the authority to tell the hysteric’s incoherent - or ambiguous story for her is a replacement Apollo figure, who like the god, represents truth and
objectivity (46-47).
These etymological and connotative links between the Pythias’, Cassandra’s, and
the hysteric’s dependence upon a male authority to speak and be heard undermine
Juaristi’s attempt to liken himself to the marginal, unheeded Cassandra at the end of his
autobiography after having earlier delegitimized a woman’s point of view by labeling her
as hysterical. How can Juaristi claim to occupy the position of the hysterical Cassandra
after he has already established himself as a possessor of superior academic authority? In
fact, this adoption of the Cassandra position counteracts his self-portrayal in the rest of
his prose works as an objective scholar in opposition to irrational Basque nationalism.
This contradiction is further illuminated by his reference in El bucle melancólico to yet
another female mythological figure: the siren. This time he likens the sirens not to
26 Janet was a pupil of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), (in)famous for
hypnotizing hysteria patients in front of audiences.
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himself, but to the threatening ancestral voices that he believes Basque and Irish
nationalisms have in common, citing James Joyce as a model of how one must be
mindful of, yet never fall prey to, their powers of persuasion: Joyce “las reconoce como
voces de sirenas y, como su modelo, Ulises, se hace atar al mástil, para no seguirlas y
ahogarse. … Temía el poder que podían tener sobre él” (28). Here Juaristi adopts
Odysseus’s (and Joyce’s, or his Ulysses character Leopold Bloom’s) male point of view
as he perceives the sirens/ancestral voices as menacing feminine Others27. Maurizio
points out that the sirens are “mythological cousins” of Cassandra and the Pythias, for
they share a defining characteristic: “When their songs have the capacity to seduce or
confound their (male) listeners, persuade them into listening to their meanings, their
listeners die. When their songs are unheeded or resisted, they themselves die” (52, n. 54).
This shared condition of Cassandra and the sirens as simultaneously threatening
and marginalized voices reveals the fundamental flaw inherent in the binary Juaristi
constructs in Cambio de destino to distinguish Basque nationalist from “non-nationalist”
ghosts. When he contrasts his liberal, modern, rational non-nationalist ghosts with the
murky ancestral voices of Basque nationalism, Juaristi dismisses the irrational, feminine,
outmoded forms of knowledge production that he associates with Basque nationalism as a
way to establish his own scholarly prestige, as is apparent in his differentiation between
the “myths” and “auto-explicaciones” of Basque nationalist pseudo-intellectuals (in
Juaristi’s view) and his own genuine “history.” Yet in spite of the authority Juaristi gains
through his alignment with and mastery of the dominant, recognized modes of knowledge
production, in order to portray himself as a marginalized victim he must momentarily
appropriate the non-empirical, supernatural knowledge associated with Cassandra. It
follows that Juaristi’s adoption of Cassandra’s position, far from a departure from the
27 This metaphor is in tune with his emasculation of Basque nationalists and association
of Basque nationalism with the Real of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which he also connects to
maternal figures, as I detail in my analysis of La tribu atribulada in Chapter One.
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binaries of masculine/feminine, rational/irrational, and public/private apparent throughout
his oeuvre, instead echoes the Ancient Greeks’ (from whom we inherited these binaries)
use of the female person as a mere vehicle of male expression. In Cambio de destino,
Cassandra serves as a vessel through which Juaristi portrays his perceived alterity within
the Basque Country. He displaces the woman, usurping her position at the margins of
dominant knowledge production while simultaneously maintaining his privileged
positioned within it. This amounts to another example of Juaristi’s erasure of female
agency and experience from his accounts of Basque social and political history. Women,
as it turns out, constitute another group of unmentioned ghosts silently occupying the
margins of Juaristi’s narrative.
Juaristi’s exclusion of women as active participants in his version of Basque
history problematizes yet another premise of his ghost dichotomy: the purported nonnationalism of his brand of ghosts, for it exposes a patriarchal structure in his work which
is also the bedrock of nationalism. This patriarchal viewpoint is apparent in Juaristi’s
allusion to yet another female character of Greek tragedy in El bucle melancólico:
Antigone. In the closing chapter of the book Juaristi describes Jone Goirizelaia, a lawyer
and, at the time, Herri Batasuna parliamentary representative, as she appears on the
Basque television network in April 1997 dancing an aurresku28 in honor of Herri
Batasuna leader Eugenio Aranburu, who had committed suicide months earlier. After
characterizing Goirizelaia in purely physical terms (“Breve melena suelta al viento,
corpiño negro sobre la cándida blusa y falda roja . . .” (382)), he compares her to
Antigone, the vengeful sister: “No es la danza de una amante entristecida, de una esposa
doliente. Es el homenaje vindicativo de la hermana, la danza de Antígona que jura
desafiar la ley de Creonte, la ley del Estado, para dar a su hermano sepultura” (384). In
this analogy, Creon represents the Spanish State and Antigone ETA and Herri Batasuna,
28 A traditional Basque dance performed at weddings, funerals, and other formal events.
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whose refusal to submit to the state’s rule leads to tragic results. According to Juaristi’s
reading of the play, which closely adheres to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s, all of the deaths
that occur result directly and solely from Antigone’s stubborn refusal to accept Creon’s
political authority in the face of her familial obligation (384). Likewise, for Juaristi it is
nationalists’ obedience of their ancestors’ voices’ calls for revenge which leads to
bloodshed in the Basque Country:
Las Antígonas nacionalistas sólo podrán aplacar los espíritus de
sus muertos, sólo podrán dejar de oír sus voces ancestrales que
claman venganza, cuando hayan arrojado sobre ellos la tierra
redimida de la patria. … Y a cualquier precio, por elevado que sea.
Porque los espíritus de los muertos sólo se aplacan con sacrificios.
La tierra sólo puede redimirse con sangre. (385)
Extending the analogy, Juaristi compares Sophocles’ chorus, which he simplistically
interprets as fully supportive of Creon and in opposition to Antigone, to the
demonstrators who gathered mere months after Goirizelaia’s aurresku to protest ETA’s
murder of Ermua resident and PP councilor Miguel Ángel Blanco. And he gives the role
of Ismene to Blanco’s sister María del Mar: “(María) no es la Antígona de esta historia,
sino quizás Ismene, ‘el sentido común y el sentimiento de la vida’” (388).
In a rigorous feminist analysis of El bucle melancólico, Carrie Hamilton takes
issue with Juaristi’s disregard of modern-day interpretations of Antigone that take into
account Creon’s inflexibility and abuse of authority and Antigone’s justification for her
actions. She maintains that while the conflict between Creon as representative of the polis
and Antigone of the family offers great potential for shining light on the conflict between
the state and sub-state nationalisms, in particular on the role of women in these political
and familial spheres (56), “Juaristi’s interpretation offers a very limited scope for new
perspective on the political situation in the Basque country precisely because it fails to
engage with the ambiguities of the play and the complexity of its characters” (55). For
example, a subtler reading of Creon and the chorus could speak to Ermua citizens’
criticism not only of ETA, but also of the Spanish State’s unyielding approach to
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terrorism at that time (55, n. 11). Furthermore, Juaristi’s characterization of Goirizelaia
and Blanco as Antigone and Ismene ignores the characters’ intimate sister-sister
relationship - a relationship which endured in spite of their difference in opinion
regarding the role of women in the public sphere -, and instead constructs a conventional
dichotomy opposing the “virgin” (the “good” Ismene/Blanco” in compliance with a
traditional, domestic role) and the “whore” (the “bad” Antigone/Goirizelaia who
oversteps the boundaries dictated by her gender), essentially converting the two women
into archetypes (54-55). Therefore, even though in El bucle melancólico Juaristi
challenges the transmission of Basque nationalist melancholia from one generation of
men to another, his exclusion of women beyond the role of mythic symbols of national
identity (Goirizelaia and Blanco exist solely as the sisters of male political actors, even
though Goirizelaia is a political actor in her own right) “leads him to reinforce rather than
challenge the central tenets of Western thought within which the movement [nationalism]
operates” (45). In other words, his relegation of women to symbolic functions reveals
Juaristi’s incapacity to escape nationalist models for perceiving social reality.
Hamilton expresses optimism that Goirizelaia’s presence at the end of El bucle
melancólico at least points to the possibility for inclusion of real, flesh-and-blood women
as active subjects in future analyses of Basque nationalism (47). However, in spite of eyeopening work like Hamilton’s, almost a decade after El bucle melancólico’s publication,
Juaristi’s treatment of women in Cambio de destino shows no sign of having evolved.
Just as El bucle melancólico’s male-centered account of the generational passing on of
nationalist melancholia, as Hamilton observes, “never questions patriarchal power
structures per se, but seeks to replace one set of fathers with another” (46-7), Cambio de
destino operates within the same limiting, all-male parameters. Thus, even though the
autobiography recounts Juaristi’s rejection of the Basque nationalist ancestral voices
imposed upon him by his father and grandfather, instead of dismantling the pattern of
transmission of values exclusively between generations of males, he merely replaces his
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father and grandfather with alternative paternal figures. For example, even after poking
fun at his nationalist grandfather Pablo’s obsession with researching his genealogy
(“manía genealógica” (23)), in the first chapter of Cambio de destino Juaristi filters
through his family history, tossing aside the Carlists and Basque nationalists, until he
comes across male ancestors with whom he prefers to identify: his liberal great- and
great-great grandfathers. Another father figure for Juaristi was his literary mentor Gabriel
Aresti. He writes that when Aresti died, he felt as though he lost a father: “Sensación de
orfandad: sólo así puedo describir mi estado de ánimo tras la muerte de Gabriel” (275).
Other examples include his uncle Joseba (whose depiction in La tribu atribulada I
discuss extensively above), a father in his capacities as priest and as Juaristi’s
philosophical guide, and O’Brien and Joyce, whose considerable influence on Juaristi’s
writing and beliefs makes them his Irish fathers. Juaristi seeks to illustrate his “outsider”
intellectual status by way of his pertinence to an “alternative” patriarchal lineage which
includes the above mentioned role models; yet paradoxically it is precisely this structure
of patriarchal lineage which likens rather than differs Juaristi from his Basque nationalist
enemies. In his attempt to write an alternative Basque history, Juaristi fails to question the
fact that all of the protagonists of his personal and the Basque Country’s collective
histories are male; he simply refills the patriarchal mold with different men.
This is clearly exemplified in his shift from his past membership within an ETA
led and populated overwhelmingly by young men to his present-day association with an
exclusively male pantheon of ostensibly “non-nationalist” ghosts, a shift which does not
herald an abandonment of militancy; he simply switches sides. Even as an ex-etarra
Juaristi continues to perceive himself as a sort of warrior. For example, he refers to his
ghostly peers in Cambio de destino as “desaparecido(s) en combate” (391). And the title
of the final chapter, “Hacia la derrota final,” which refers to his finally succumbing to
ETA’s pressure by fleeing Bilbao in 1999, implies his participation in a battle against
Basque nationalists, something he had already narrated in La tribu atribulada: “Jamás se
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me pasó por la cabeza que vivir en Madrid implicaba dejar de combatir al nacionalismo
vasco. La huida es un movimiento táctico: uno se repliega para poder atacar mejor”
(129). Finally, in his prologue to Varela’s Contra la violencia, Juaristi praises the book
with a military metaphor that is seemingly at odds with the non-violent intentions
suggested by the book’s title: “un arma intelectual de primer orden para el combate
político contra el mayor enemigo de nuestra libertad, la de todos los españoles” (13). This
apparent paradox is resolved when one recalls that Juaristi, as I illustrate in the above
section on La tribu atribulada, is only “contra la violencia” which is not state-sponsored;
he in fact discredits pacifism as an approach to dealing with the political problem posed
by Basque nationalists. Because, as Joane Nagel elucidates, nationalism and militant
masculinity are so thoroughly intertwined, that Juaristi’s present-day militancy fights
against Basque nationalism does not make it altogether non-nationalist. Rather, it
functions at the service of Spanish nationalism. In an article on masculinity and
nationalism, Nagel explains that because the modern form of Western masculinity
emerged around the same time as modern nationalism – the turn of the twentieth century
– (“Masculinity” 249), and because most state institutions have been historically and
remain today male-dominated (252), hegemonic nationalism and hegemonic masculinity
are inextricably linked. One of the key male-dominated state institutions that Nagel cites
as upholding both nationhood and manhood is the military. It upholds nationalism
because the nation’s goal of either achieving or maintaining sovereign statehood
generally relies on armed conflict. At the same time, it upholds the Western definition of
masculinity thanks to the themes and values that both share, including honor, patriotism,
bravery, and duty (252), the last two of which Juaristi highlights as traits sadly lacking
among Spanish progressives who adopt more lenient approaches to Basque nationalism
(La tribu 129; Cambio 184). If patriarchy and nationalism are so intertwined, it is
impossible for Juaristi to break free altogether from nationalist paradigms while
maintaining the patriarchal ones. Juaristi’s metaphorical military endeavors, the aim of
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which is to preserve the integrity of the Spanish nation in the face of the threat posed by
Basque separatism, betray Juaristi’s alignment with the often-denied centralist Spanish
nationalism.
Alternative Story or Blindness to the Ghosts?
Juaristi’s adherence to the patriarchal social and epistemological structures which
sustain Western nations reveals his ties to Spanish nationalism; yet these patriarchal
discourses account for only one of the many lines of argument that Juaristi’s work shares
with the predominant forms of contemporary Spanish nationalism. Xosé Manuel NúñezSexias unravels the multiple discursive strategies used by Spain’s left and right in their
efforts to redefine the Spanish nation since the Transition, many of which focus on
protecting the territorial integrity of Spain by undermining sub-state nationalisms.
Several of Juaristi’s rhetorical attacks on Basque nationalism match up with the
discourses spotlighted by Núñez. Juaristi is not exceptional, for example, in purporting
the nonexistence of Spanish nationalism; Núñez explains that during Spain’s Transition
to democracy from 1975 to 1978, politicians, the media, and intellectuals alike promoted
the notion that Spanish nationalism, which they associated with Franco’s specific brand
of traditionalist nationalism, including its narrow interpretation of history and its
upholding of Catholicism as a defining trait of “Spanishness,” had disappeared along
with the authoritarian regime. In its efforts to reject and distance itself from Francoism,
Núñez argues, Spanish nationalism morphed and multiplied during those years, taking
various forms on the left and right. And at the same time, its proponents avoided using
the terms “nationalism” or “nationalist” altogether except in reference to sub-state
nationalist movements. As a result, Spanish nationalism remains, when not altogether
denied, an insufficiently examined phenomenon (719).
This denial of present-day Spanish nationalism hinges on the collective
“forgetting” of the civil war, the dictatorship, and its effects on the present. In other
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words, Juaristi’s repression of the ghosts of Spain’s traumatic twentieth century through
his denial of Franco’s lingering presence in contemporary Spain makes way for the
argument that Spain’s Transition fully healed its historical wounds and readied it for a
purely civic patriotism based on loyalty to the 1978 Constitution. According to Núñez,
the assertion that Spanish nationalist sentiment has been replaced by a limited
interpretation of Habermas’s notion of constitutional patriotism is common. Yet Núñez
insists “a pure civic patriotism incarnated in a constitution without appeal to emotional,
historical or cultural links has yet to appear in any country of the world” (737), and
merely renaming citizens’ emotional attachment to the nation “patriotism” does not
render it any less nationalistic (738).
This modern, all-inclusive civic patriotism is frequently understood in direct
opposition to sub-state nationalism’s allegedly ethnocentric, exclusive, and totalitarian
nature (725). Within this paradigm, peripheral nationalism is an obsolete phenomenon
which depends upon manipulation and coercion - or the denial of individual rights - for
its survival (730-32). This opposition, embodied to the letter by Juaristi’s “non-nationalist
ghost/ancestral voice” dichotomy, is for Núñez an unfair and inaccurate generalization,
for Spanish constitutional nationalisms are not purely civic just as sub-state nationalisms
are not purely essentialist or ethnic-based (744). The former “also include an appeal to
supposedly objective elements such as history, culture and even language, which are
reputed to be the basic founding elements of the Spanish nation,” while the latter include
important segments “which insist on the need to build civic nations based on an inclusive
character” and “acceptance of a coexistence of different loyalties and cultures” (744).
Spanish nationalism’s comparatively subtler deployment of national symbols and (at least
nominal) tolerance of cultural pluralism (especially on the far left) allows this simplistic
opposition to endure.
However, contemporary Spanish nationalism’s (in its varying forms) acceptance
of cultural pluralism, while it reinforces its self-depiction as open and tolerant, is limited
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in two key ways. First, its acceptance of Spain’s diversity does not extend beyond the
cultural. According to Núñez, “nationality,” the special term designated for the Basque
Country, Catalonia, and Galicia in the 1978 Constitution, though undefined in the
document, was later defined through parliamentary debates as “a ‘cultural and linguistic
community’, which was not a subject of sovereignty” (723). This label thus performs the
dual function of officially recognizing peripheral cultures’ unique identities while subtly
denying them the political authority to form a sovereign state. A version of the discourse
of the historic nationalities as mere cultural nations is at work in Juaristi’s interpretation
of Basque nationalism as a series of tribal, familial, and psychological dramas, which
largely exclude it from the political realm. Second, even at the cultural level Spanish
nationalism’s acceptance of plurality is limited. For example, “For many Spanish
‘patriots’ multilingualism is a social reality which is difficult to accept” due to “the
widespread belief that Castilian is, and should remain, the dominant and common
language” (744-5), hence the vehement reactions against language policies in Catalonia
and the Basque Country promoting the use of Catalan and Basque. As another example,
Núñez notes that often “stateless nationalisms are accused of being based upon historical
fantasy and non-scientific literary imagination, due to the inventions of second-rank
intellectuals” (731). When Juaristi disparages Basque cultural production, deeming
useless the work of the, in his eyes mostly mediocre, scholars dedicated to it, while
simultaneously working for institutions aimed at promoting the Spanish language and
culture, he displays the limitations of Spanish constitutional patriotism’s self-proclaimed
openness to cultural pluralism.
Viewing Juaristi’s portrayal of the Basque Country in light of Núñez’s sharp
observations reveals its alignment with the most prevalent discourses of Spanish
nationalism of the democratic period. This alignment calls into question the “alternative”
nature of his narratives which he announces in El bucle melancólico, and which Gordon
advocates in her sociological theory of the ghost. Casting further doubt upon Juaristi’s
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claims of writing alternative stories is Juaristi’s employment of many of the same
rhetorical tools he disparages when used by his Basque nationalist foes. Besides his
(already examined) reliance upon patriarchal discourse, a hallmark of nationalism, in his
multifarious questioning of Basque nationalists’ manliness, Juaristi centers Cambio de
destino around his victimization at the hands of a Basque society overtaken by
nationalism even after previously calling nationalists out for focusing on their perceived
victimhood: “La estrategia global del abertzalismo es victimista” (Bucle 19). Another
way Juaristi’s arguments mirror his enemies’ is in their reference to the Irish
independence struggle. Juaristi undercuts Basque separatists’ long-standing tendency to
liken themselves to Irish Republicans by insisting that in spite of “ciertas semejanzas
engañosas” in reality “Irlanda es un mal espejo para los vascos. Probablemente, no habrá
un país cuya historia se parezca menos a la de Vasconia” (65). Yet Juaristi’s rebuttals to
Basque nationalists’ arguments are equally infused with the Irish context due to his heavy
reliance on O’Brien’s and Joyce’s reflections on their homeland. Thus, Juaristi applies
anti-Irish Republicanism to the Basque Country in the same way Basque nationalists
implement Irish Republicanism for their own purposes.
As a final example, in El bucle melancólico Juaristi faults two Basque nationalist
ideologues for, in the absence of a genuine Basque nation, conflating an imagined nation
with his own person. The first is Arana, who according to Juaristi invented a lost nation
as a replacement for his former childhood home, with the result being that the concept of
Basque nationalism is at its origins inextricably fused with Arana himself. Later, Juaristi
speculates, as Krutwig sought to break away from Aranist nationalism and
reconceptualize the Basque nation, he realized that his fellow Basques did not yet possess
the two characteristics needed to realize his idealized nation: the consciousness of being
Basque, gained only through the possession of the Basque language, and the will to
continue being so. Krutwig’s solution was to put himself forward as the definition and
embodiment of the ideal: “En el límite, voluntad y conciencia sólo se dan en el propio
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Krutwig.” (288). Juaristi mentions that Krutwig was, like Arana, an “incurable
melancólico,” and he wonders whether Krutwig’s nationalist melancholy stems from the
premature loss of his father (291). According to Juaristi, in spite of Krutwig’s attempts to
distance himself from Aranism, “Como Sabino Arana, Krutwig está fundando una nación
que se confunde con él, que es mera prótesis de un cuerpo, emanación de una conciencia
y de una voluntad personales. Funda y funde a la vez” (291). Paradoxically, in his writing
posterior to El bucle melancólico, Juaristi appears to imitate the strategy used by the two
Basque nationalist theorists. Juaristi’s subsequent turn toward the autobiographical genre
in his continued defense of the territorial integrity of the Spanish State against the threat
of Basque nationalism suggest a conflation of the nation with the self similar to the one
he identifies in Arana’s and Krutwig’s work. This idea is put forth by Joseba Gabilondo
in an essay dealing with three autobiographies written by self-proclaimed “nonnationalists”: Fernando Savater, Mario Onaindía (one of Juaristi’s fellow “ghosts”), and
Juaristi29. Gabilondo notices an autobiographical boom in recent Spanish-language
Basque literature, attributing the prevalence of the genre to a crisis in the national subject.
According to Gabilondo, the self of these autobiographies descends from the nineteenthcentury intellectual whose role it was to heal national wounds, patch together a
fragmented national body, and reflect back toward the populace an ideal nation in the
face of national crises, such as Spain’s territorial loss in the Spanish-American War (“The
State’s Body” 194-5). However, these autobiographical selves belong to a new
globalized, post-national, and neoliberal context in which the nineteenth-century
intellectual’s genres of choice - essay and newspaper article - are no longer effective in
producing national identification; so, as Gabilondo explains, they write themselves
instead:
29 Gabilondo’s article, published before Cambio de destino, makes reference to La tribu
atribulada’s autobiographical elements. His analysis is primarily dedicated to Savater’s Mira por
donde (2003) and Onaindía’s El precio de la libertad (2001).
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In these auto-bio-graphies, a body writes itself in order to
unsuccessfully perform a melancholic identification with an
imaginary and ideal Spanish nation – the national body – so that
this identification can serve for the rest of the Spanish citizens to
identify with a Spanish subject, the State, which is experiencing its
crisis and fragmentation in globalization. (185)
The way Juaristi attempts to identify himself with an ideal Spanish nation in La
tribu atribulada and later in Cambio de destino is through disavowal of his past, namely
his Basque nationalist ancestors and elders and his former radical political activism,
which is representative of those subaltern elements that resist absorption into the state
and are thus dejected by it. Therefore, Gabilondo remarks, in their effort to “create a
teleological narrative that culminates in democracy, adulthood, and national stability”
(207), these collections of memories “ironically enough, do not remember but forget, just
as the Spanish political parties did during the democratic transition, in what became
known as ‘el pacto con el olvido’” (215). Gabilondo interprets the writers’ rejection of
their pasts as a form of violence, but one which does not completely erase their subaltern
histories: “the violence that the writers exert in their biographies towards their previous
biological identifications contradicts and haunts their current identificatory selves and
bodies” (207). Juaristi’s “ancestral voices” constitute the subaltern past that haunts his
present in spite of his incessant efforts to suppress it. Even in his current home of Madrid
the ancestral voices continue to disturb him, inciting him to write one book after another
(Gabilondo has said, “compulsively”) aimed at finally smothering them.
As I have attempted to show throughout this chapter, Juaristi’s prose works from
El bucle melancólico to Cambio de destino, rather than engage with, in fact seek to stamp
out the ghostly Others that threaten the hegemony of the democratic Spanish State, be
they the irrational Basque “ancestral voices,” the anachronistic ghosts of the Civil War
and Francoist dictatorship, or “hysterical” feminist voices. In this way, Juaristi
inadvertently reveals Spain as a haunted institution trying to repress (or “forget”) the
ghosts in its house. This also points to Juaristi’s exclusionary definition of the Spanish
nation and its rightful members, and the expulsion of that which fails or refuses to
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conform to that definition, or in other words, nationalism. Juaristi’s essays, then, do not
function as a non-nationalist alternative to, but rather a continuation of the long-standing
confrontation between Spanish and Basque nationalisms. The perpetuation of the conflict
is symptomatic of what Núñez (citing Juan Linz) refers to as a paradoxical failure of both
state and minority nationalisms in Spain (740); because none of the nationalisms in Spain
has successfully imposed its identity upon the entirety of the disputed communities, the
struggle for hegemony goes on. Being trapped within this bipolar opposition means
losing sight of the individuals and groups left at its margins. The conflict between the two
exclusive identities tends to consume political discourse, the media, and scholarship,
eclipsing the groups and individuals who pertain to neither. It is to such figures whom
Gordon refers in Ghostly Matters when she insists upon the importance of engaging with,
rather than banishing spectral voices as a means of establishing our scientific and
humanistic knowledge and achieving positive social transformation (23). According to
Gordon, taking the spectral into account requires that we recognize the “right to complex
personhood” of those with whom our academic or political pursuits are concerned (4).
For Gordon, complex personhood is about acknowledging “that all people . . . remember
and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and
others” (4). And it entails “conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming
that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously
subtle meaning” (5). Gordon’s emphasis on complex personhood has particular relevance
in the case of Spain’s competing nationalisms, which often do not speak to the
complexity of identity especially within Spain’s historical nationalities, where the
majority of those populations identify simultaneously with a peripheral nationality and
the Spanish nation (Balfour and Quiroga 4; Núñez 742). In addition to the silent many
who possess such dual identities, other figures marginalized by polarizing nationalist
political discourse are immigrants and minority ethnic groups who are not easily
encompassed by either traditional Spanish or Basque definitions of national membership,
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as well as women and homosexuals, whose interests are not a priority within nationalist
narratives that romanticize historical periods in which they enjoyed few rights. By either
altogether excluding or dismissing as incompatible with modernity the ghosts in his
narratives, Juaristi does the opposite of recognizing complex personhood, which for
Gordon, citing Horkheimer and Adorno’s brief articulation of haunting30, amounts to
“the reduction of individuals ‘to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences which
leave no trace, or rather whose trace is hated as irrational, superfluous, and ‘overtaken’’”
(Gordon 20). As I have shown time and again in this chapter, Juaristi’s treatment of the
trace left by the Basque ancestral voices resembles the latter.
The ghost’s anachronism, irrationality, and incompatibility with modernity make
it an object of hatred; it is also because of these traits that the ghost is feared. Gordon
acknowledges that, “Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm
inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present” (xvi).
By exposing previously hidden past or present violence, the ghost disrupts the calm
surface of the status quo. A haunting, then, is an instant “…when things are not in their
assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are
meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings
cannot be put away. . .” (xvi). Buse and Stott also attribute the ghost’s unsettling effects
to its ability to “disrupt our sense of a linear teleology in which the consecutive
movement of history passes untroubled through generations” (14). Juaristi’s ancestral
voices disrupt the past by distorting the historical narrative of Spain’s destined
progression, beginning in the Middle Ages, toward its current shape as a territorially
unified democratic state. And they unsettle the present by subverting the notion that
contemporary Spain has successfully left its past behind and reached that destiny. But
30 A two-page note called “On The Theory of Ghosts” appended to The Dialectic of
Enlightenment.
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ghosts, as Buse and Stott remind us, also perturb the future. This is why, they argue,
fictional representations of ghosts so often portray them demanding action from someone
living after their own time, “destabiliz[ing] any neat compartmentalization of the past as a
secure and fixed entity, or the future as uncharted territory” (14). Gordon calls this
interruption of the ghost in the future the “something-to-be-done” (xvi) that a haunting
produces. A haunting occurs, then, “when something else, something different from
before, seems like it must be done” (xvi). Juaristi recognizes this capacity of the ghost to
spark future change as he concludes Cambio de destino. Optimistic that his admired
“non-nationalist” ghosts may continue making their presence felt in the future, he asks
them, “¿Nada sois? ¿No viviréis de nuevo? ¿Cómo dejar de ser, cuando se ha sido? No es
tan fácil regresar a la nada, liberarse del fragor del ser” (391). And in his farewell poem
to Bilbao, he insinuates that he too will haunt the Basque Country after his departure with
the desire to influence a future generation: “Entre sus moradores alguien crece / Para
quien defendiste la techumbre, / Los muros y los altos ventanales / Donde la luz cernida
comparece / Cada nueva mañana” (392). The image of the morning light shining upon the
Basque house is an expression of Juaristi’s hope for future change, which he aims to
bring about by telling his version of the past.
But one must ask whether Juaristi’s haunting in the Basque Country intends to
spark a “something-to-be-done” which is truly “something else, something different from
before” (Gordon xvi) or a repetition of past violences. As I have shown in this chapter,
Juaristi’s self-depiction as a ghostly figure is problematized by his privileged position
within academic and state institutions and a patriarchal society; likewise, his vision for
the future, as expressed in his writings, more closely resembles a regression than a
transformation. Thus, Juaristi’s opposition of two different kinds of Basque ghosts - the
dangerous “voces ancestrales” that must be muted, and the legitimate “non-nationalists”
whose stories offer hope for future change -, collapses once and for all. The ghost is a
marginalized and delegitimized figure precisely because the danger it poses to the status
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quo is terrifying; while the “hysterical” feminist activist threatens the patriarchal order,
for example, the ancestral voices defy the state’s rule of law. Yet only engaging with, not
blocking out, these frightening disruptions offers the possibility of social transformation
and “peaceful reconciliation” (Gordon 208). By usurping the position of the ghost in
order to portray himself as subversive (appropriating for reactionary aims a term which
has long formed part of Marxist theoretical vocabulary, just as he appropriates
Cassandra’s voice for patriarchal purposes), while simultaneously wielding his academic,
institutional, and patriarchal authority, Juaristi more effectively eclipses the specters
forgotten at the margins of the battle for dominance between Spanish and Basque
nationalisms. In order to end the polarizing power struggle and achieve, in Juaristi’s
words, a “nueva mañana” that is actually new, the relationship between the anti-Basque
nationalist ghosts and the ancestral voices must shift from one of opposition to one of
reconciliation, a transformation which will require the writing of truly alternative stories.
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PART II: ALBERT BOADELLA’S MEMORIAS DE UN BUFÓN AND
ADIÓS, CATALUÑA: TWO TALES OF ESTRANGEMENT
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CHAPTER 3: BECOMING A BUFFOON: THE LIMITS OF
TRANSGRESSION IN MEMORIAS DE UN BUFÓN
At its beginnings, Albert Boadella’s theater company Els Joglars, which he cofounded in 1961 and directed from 1966 to 2012, formed part of the leftist and Catalan
nationalist cultural circles that opposed the Francoist dictatorship. Eventually, though,
Boadella’s (who enjoyed a great deal of creative control over the group’s productions)
political satire shifted to target his former allies, many of whom subsequently branded
him a traitor to Catalonia. In his first autobiography Memorias de un bufón (2001),
Boadella recounts his childhood during the early years of the dictatorship, his artistic and
professional evolution, and the political conflicts that set him on a path toward
“professional exile” from Catalonia (the last of which he will expand upon in his second
autobiography, which I discuss in Chapter 4). In Memorias, Boadella adopts the role of
the jester, a transgressive figure due to his liminal social position and ability to criticize
authority figures. Through this portrayal, Boadella portrays himself as an independent
thinker by nature who has never aligned himself with hegemonic ideology. According to
Boadella’s own depiction, he gained this independence, as I will identify, by way of a
series of rites of passage that established his credentials as a public intellectual and artist.
However, in my view, he also uses these same rites to exclude from public debate political and artistic - both women and those men who fail to conform to the traditional
definitions of masculinity that he adheres to. At the same time they depict the Catalan
political and cultural setting from which Boadella breaks free as suffocating and
provincial. My analysis of Memorias will call into question the playwright’s purportedly
transgressive position by showing how his jester-like critique of power stops short of
state institutions, which Boadella, far from calling into question, in fact conceals by
framing his narrative of supposed transgression at the regional level. Instead, by depicting
progressives and Catalan nationalists as failing to fulfill normative gender roles, I will
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argue, Boadella aligns himself with a traditionalist Spanish nationalism underpinned by
patriarchal discourses.
Boadella the Buffoon
In the first pages of Memorias de un bufón, in an allusion to the Yorick scene of
Hamlet, Boadella pictures the cemetery where he will one day rest and imagines that a
small inscription will distinguish his gravesite from others. This inscription will identify
him as the “Bufón General del Reino” (15-16). For Boadella, being a buffoon means
evading and criticizing social conventions, hegemonic political ideologies, and prevailing
aesthetic modes, and throughout his autobiography he aims to prove his status as Spain’s
court jester. A brief summary of Boadella’s and Els Joglars’ history would suggest that
Boadella has earned the credentials of a free-thinking critic of authority, or jester. Els
Joglars emerged in the early stage of Spain’s teatro independiente movement as one of
many alternative theater groups active in the 1960s and 1970s in Spain. As Mercè
Saumell explains in her history of the movement, its two main objectives were to
participate in the leftist struggle against Francoism and to establish an aesthetic, cultural,
and political alternative to established commercial theater (5). Because these theater
groups were working under censorship imposed by Franco’s regime and in place until
1977, they developed aesthetically innovative techniques for expressing dissent, such as
mime in the case of Els Joglars. Saumell also links Spain’s teatro independiente to the
broader international post-1968 theater movement that aimed to challenge dominant
social structures, part of which included acting as a voice for oppressed national
minorities, such as the Catalans, Basque, and Galicians (6). Thus, the Barcelona-based
independent theater movement of which Els Joglars formed part, in conjunction with the
Nova Cançó, functioned as the cultural nucleus for the left wing and Catalan nationalist
alliance in their common struggle against the dictatorship (9).
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Els Joglars, which had already started gaining international critical and public
recognition in the late 1960s, has been one of the most successful and long-standing
groups to come out of the independent theater movement. And the group has managed to
take advantage of its critical success and popularity to initiate substantial social change.
For example, it was Boadella’s and a number of Els Joglars actors’ 1977 incarceration
after their performance of La torna, a work criticizing the military’s execution in 1974 of
an anarchist and a criminal, that generated such enormous backlash from supporters
demanding freedom of expression that Adolfo Suárez’s UCD government finally
abolished censorship (10). In Saumell’s view, the “reactions brought by their bravery,
their ability to provoke and their stage skills has revived and indeed brought to the fore
one of the most basic functions of theatre: biting criticism” (Saumell 16).
The new democratic state brought on the eventual death of the independent
theater movement, with many of its formerly dissident participants taking positions in
government cultural institutions or adapting their work to fit the commercial market.
According to Saumell, Els Joglars is one of very few groups from the independent theater
movement that has managed to maintain its autonomy as a private professional company
after the transition to democracy (10). The scandal caused by their 1983 parody of
religious rituals Teledeum, for example, caused such outrage among the Church and
conservatives that the group received death threats. But Boadella’s favorite targets since
the transition to democracy have been his former allies: Catalan nationalists and
progressives, whose ideologies, he believes, have become hegemonic and, in his view,
repressive in present-day Catalonia. It is Boadella’s stance that Catalan culture has
experienced a continuous decline ever since the implementation of the cultural policies of
the Generalitat under Jordi Pujol and his center-right moderate nationalist party
Convergència i Unió (CiU).
In her case study of the Generalitat’s cultural policy during CiU’s long tenure
(1980 to 2003, when Socialist Pasqual Maragall replaced Pujol as President of the
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Generalitat), Kathryn Crameri details how the party used cultural policy as a nationbuilding tool. Thanks to broad consensus in Catalonia regarding the need for cultural
revitalization following decades-long repression under Franco, as well as the moderate
CiU’s ability to attract a wide range of public support, the party in effect enjoyed free
reign to push forth its model of Catalan national identity through its cultural policy.
Under Pujol, “the Generalitat did not even pretend to be culturally neutral when deciding
which forms to culture to support…” (39). CiU’s openly biased approach involved a
combination of a great deal of institutionalization culture and the privileging of Catalanlanguage production and high culture (in the tradition of the bourgeois Modernisme and
Noucentisme movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) (72, 99). In
its efforts to define what is “Catalan,” Crameri argues, CiU attempted to clearly
demarcate the Spanish and Catalan cultural fields, which in fact overlap to a great extent,
resulting in artificial boundaries between Spanish and Catalan culture that leave little
space for artists like Boadella who reject CiU’s definition of “catalanness” (10). The
immoderate institutionalization of Catalan culture, according to Crameri, has
compromised creative risk taking (subsidies are rarely doled out without political strings
attached) and deterred some alternative artists from producing in Catalan, which they
began to associate with the establishment (97, 71). For Crameri, Els Joglars represents a
minority of innovative theater groups that have resisted CiU’s institutionalization of
theater (97).
Els Joglars’ comparative independence from the autonomous governments’
institutional support (as a private cooperative, the group receives less direct public
funding than most - about 8% of the company’s annual budget (Sánchez Arnosi 14)), as
well as its physical separation from Barcelona, the nucleus of the dominant Catalanist
cultural movements (in 1972 Boadella transported Els Joglars to Girona’s rural
Ampurdán county), has permitted Boadella to resist and satirize CiU’s nation-building
efforts (Feldman 60). This is the view of theater critics like Sharon Feldman, who praises
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Els Joglars’ understanding of CiU’s construction of national culture as a performative act:
“Thus, they conceive the concept of nationality as a creative process, rather than a sacred
truth, emphasizing the manner through which this concept habitually undergoes invention
and fabrication” (59). Feldman looks specifically at the group’s 1995 production Ubu
president, an updated version of their earlier work Operació Ubú (1981), which borrows
from Alfred Jarry’s biting satire Ubu Roi (1896) to lampoon Jordi Pujol by portraying
him as a bumbling megalomaniac. Operació Ubú represented a turning point for Els
Joglars, for it is with this work that Boadella announces his departure from and antipathy
towards the Catalan nationalism with which Els Joglars was associated at its beginnings.
Feldman describes how in Ubú President Els Joglars performs CiU’s version of
catalanidad by “insiduously manipulat[ing] and mimic[ing] the emblems of nationalism
and patriotism that historically have contributed to the construction of a ‘universal’
Catalan identity (68). These parodied symbols include, among others, the senyera (the
Catalan flag), the Virgin of Montserrat, Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, and the FC Barcelona
football club. In this way Ubú President produces “an ambivalent zone of distinction
between the real and the copy” and reflects back onto the Catalan government its
performative nature “in a kind of esperpentic mirror,” thereby displaying and
undermining the nation-building process (68, 59). Els Joglars’ “performance of
resistance” (47) did not go unanswered by Pujol’s Generalitat. According to Lourdes
Orozco, the autonomous government retaliated Boadella’s satirical attacks on their leader
by denying them future public subsidies. Orozco argues that Boadella’s is not the only
case of CiU’s strategic handling of subsidies. In her view, in spite of its stated intentions,
the Generalitat’s practice of subsidies distribution reveals that one of its primary goals is
“la potenciació del teatre produït per la mateixa Generalitat” (website). An example of
this is its funding of large projects, such as the controversial construction of the Teatre
Nacional de Catalunya (inaugurated in 1997) in Barcelona, instead of alternative theater
groups or smaller festivals, especially in underfunded parts of rural Catalonia. An
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increase in Generalitat-produced theater, Orozco explains, entails ideological and
aesthetic restrictions on Catalonia’s theater. Proof of the artistic restrictions placed on
alternative theater groups by CiU’s Generalitat is the dramatic decrease in public funding
granted to Els Joglars following Operació Ubú. Beyond the financial retaliation, Orozco
adds (referencing Boadella’s own statements), the Generalitat directed a “campanya de
desprestigi” toward Els Joglars, resulting in an effective boycott of the company by
theaters, Catalan public television, and town festivals (website). This institutional
marginalization and public rejection eventually led Boadella to “professional exile,”
announced in his second autobiography Adiós, Cataluña. Crónica de amor y de guerra
(2007). Though he continues living in Girona, his work is focused in Madrid, where he
currently directs the Teatros del Canal (as I will discuss in more detail below), and Els
Joglars, which continues touring throughout Spain, stopped presenting its works in
Catalonia.31
According to Milagros Sánchez Arnosi, editor of Boadella’s “Catalan Trilogy”
(2006) of his most biting Catalan-directed satires Ubú President, La increíble historia del
Dr. Floit y Mr. Pla, and Daaalí, Boadella’s position as a social outsider in Catalonia
grants him the freedom to criticize in the most outrageous manner the powers that
otherwise go unquestioned, in the way of the buffoon:
Boadella actuando como un ‘bufón’ se permite todas las
extravagancias, locuras y críticas que pasan por la mente de los
burladores y rompe el tabú abierta e ingeniosamente, como en la
época de Velázquez, cuando los reyes tenían un bufón que, además
de ser contemplado como un ser sagrado, gozaba del privilegio de
decir al monarca todo lo que quería y se le ocurría. (15)
31 In September 2012 Boadella announced his retirement as director of Els Joglars,
passing the reigns on to long-time Els Joglars actor Ramon Fontserè. It has yet to be seen how the
politics of the company will change under Fontserè’s leadership; however, the fact that the
group’s first tour since Boadella’s departure (beginning in April 2013 and in which they will
perform Cervantes’s El coloquio de los perros) will include shows in Catalonia, suggests a shift
in its relationship with its homeland (Barrigós “Els Joglars, ya sin Boadella”).
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Fernando Bouza, in his study of marginalized figures of Spain’s history, discusses the
freedoms enjoyed by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century court jester, including “la
falta de respeto con que los truhanes se mofaban abiertamente de las convenciones
sociales, . . . rompían las ceremonias e ignoraban las mínimas normas de
comportamiento, [y] hablaban a todos y de todo con su acerada lengua libre” (121).
Bouza explains that the desperately poor buffoon often feigned madness in order procure
a position in the court (123). At the same time, this “máscara de la locura” served a
pedagogical purpose, for it was through the lens of insanity and eccentricity that the
buffoon could illuminate a viewpoint that broke with hegemonic ideology “para imaginar
un mundo diferente” (122). Boadella similarly performs the role of buffoon by
constructing a coherent self in his autobiography that is innately and consistently
nonconformist, beginning with his childhood. Just as the figure of the buffoon resists
integration within conventional social relations, Memorias fashions a Boadella who from
birth was an “individualista compulsivo” (Memorias 17) with a “debilidad por nadar a
contracorriente” (410), and an inheritor of his father’s “innato e incorrigible impulso . . .
de llevar la contraria por sistema” (342). Boadella underscores the artificial nature of this
performed self by splitting the narration of Memorias between two alternating narrators: a
first-person narrator in Catalan and a third-person narrator in Spanish.32 As the thirdperson narrator explains, Boadella’s buffoon persona is merely a tactic for freeing
himself from the influence of those who aim to impose their beliefs on him:
. . . el Bufón gustaba de mover el títere que había creado a su
imagen y semejanza, el cual era utilizado como Diana de las
embestidas exteriores, para preservar mejor su intimidad. En este
sentido, el hecho de asignarse el apodo “Bufón”, tan lejos de su
estilo teatral, era una argucia más para confundir al adversario, que
así le catalogaba despectivamente en un epígrafe erróneo. De esta
forma, empadronado definitivamente como títere, sentía su libertad
menos vulnerable. (17)
32 In the Spanish edition, which I cite here, the distinction between the two narrators is
highlighted by bolding the text pertaining to the first-person narrator.
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Thus, Boadella’s buffoon-like mask - or “puppet” - protects him from the powerful forces
that he dedicates himself to ridiculing. Ángel Loureiro, author of The ethics of
autobiography: replacing the subject in modern Spain, reminds us that autobiographical
writing is a performative act. Far from a record of verifiable truths, autobiography is now
generally understood as the creative construction of the self, always mediated through
restrictive discourses (19-20). The self that Boadella performs in Memorias is that of the
transgressor. In the pages that follow I will analyze the discourses that mold Boadella’s
self-characterization, but first it is necessary to consider what it means to be
transgressive.
As I have shown, a number of key scholars of Catalan theater and culture call Els
Joglars’s theater “transgressive” (Feldman, Sánchez Arnosi), “anti-establishment”
(Crameri), and “independent” (Saumell). They are not alone. According to the Spanish
press, which frequently features interviews with Boadella in its cultural sections
headlined with his most provocative statements,33 Boadella is Spanish theater’s premier
iconoclast even today.34 However, provocation and political incorrectness alone do not
constitute transgression. According to Tim Cresswell’s theory on the role of place in
ideological constructions and transgressions, when a social actor is perceived as “out of
place” for having entered a physical space in which she does not apparently belong, this
33 “Hay pocas terapias posibles para Cataluña” (La Razón, October 20, 2012); “La
Cataluña que yo conocí ha sido sustituida por una región cateta” (La Opinión de Zamora,
February 29, 2012); “Boadella: ‘¿Existe algún ser humano inteligente, sin defectuosidad visual, al
cual le gusta Tàpies?” (Periodista Digital, February 14, 2012), “Albert Boadella: ‘Llegados aquí,
hay que dejar que Cataluña se suicide’: ‘Yo incluso les pegaría un empujoncito’” (Periodista
Digital, September 22, 2012); “Es un orgullo que me llamen facha” (Periodista Digital, October
25, 2010)
34 “Tan sólo la inminencia de su retirada como director de Joglars templa su airado afán
de seguir granjeándose enemigos, mejor cuanto más poderosos” (José María Albert de Paco,
“Boadella y su punto de fuga,” Libertad Digital, September 1, 2013.); “. . . el bufón más crítico
de la escena española” (Javier Pérez de Albéniz, “Albert Boadella o Els Joglars: La provocación
cumple años,” La Revista de El Mundo, January 11, 1998); “Un irreductible de la
libertad”(Cristina Fanjul, “‘En España hay una buena sociedad de cretinismo ilustrado muy
importante’” (Interview with Boadella), Diario de León, April 3, 2012.
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action momentarily brings to light the hegemonic cultural values that condition our social
perception of physical spaces, or the “normative geographies . . . defined by those with
the power to do so” (10). As Cresswell explains, “when different spatial ideologies come
into conflict [through a transgressive act] . . . They are taken out of the role of ‘common
sense’ and are stated as ‘the right way’” (10). Thus, working in a Bourdieuan framework,
Cresswell defines transgression as an act that pushes the naturalized - or “misrecognized”
- doxa into the visible, conscious level of orthodoxy, which “unlike doxa, implies some
awareness of alternative experiences” (19). Thus, transgression brings out into the open
previously unquestioned assumptions about who does and does not belong in a particular
social space, and it forces the dominant culture’s values to be enforced overtly. As we
have seen, Boadella is decidedly “out of place” within the cultural institutions of
Catalonia, and his dramatic works like Operació Ubú without a doubt helped to make
visible CiU’s deliberate construction of a national identity that was widely understood as
inherently “Catalan.” One could interpret the decrease in public subsidies directed toward
Els Joglars following Operació Ubú as a shift from doxa to orthodoxy in CiU’s nation
construction by means of cultural institutionalization, a shift brought about Els Joglars’s
provocation. However, the place of Catalonia, and in particular its cultural institutions,
are deeply embedded within a larger framework: the Spanish State. When viewed within
this larger cultural, institutional, and political space, can the public persona Boadella has
created for himself still be considered transgressive? What follows is my attempt to
evaluate just how transgressive Boadella’s performed self is through an analysis of the
discourses in Memorias through which he establishes himself as a critical outsider. As a
starting point, I will analyze the rites of passage narrated in the autobiography and
through which Boadella proves his independence.
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Rites of Passage (and Exclusion)
Throughout Memorias Boadella recounts a number of formative experiences in
his past that could be interpreted as rites of passage. One of these occurs when young
Boadella and his rebellious gang of friends go to a brothel. The boys regularly entertained
themselves by standing across the street from the brothel and shouting insults to the
entering patrons with the goal of embarrassing and annoying them. On one of these
occasions, Boadella crept dangerously close to the door of the locale, and was suddenly
snatched up and beaten by a bouncer. Rather than cower in fear or accept defeat by an
older, much larger opponent, Boadella devised a revenge plot that involved hurling
firecrackers through the brothel’s front door.
Another obstacle that Boadella surpassed, and which could also be interpreted as
a successfully completed rite of passage, was initiated by his father. Although Boadella,
now a young man, had taken an interest in and demonstrated a gift for the arts, his more
pragmatic father insisted that he learn a trade. Thus, Boadella began an apprenticeship as
a goldsmith in a workshop where the veteran craftsmen incessantly taunted the young
apprentices. Confronted with this adverse situation, Boadella strove to earn the respect of
his senior colleagues by playing one clever and merciless practical joke on them after
another. He succeeded, and his colleagues never again dared to pick on him.
These two episodes occur at different stages of Boadella’s evolution toward
adulthood, and they take place in exclusively male environments. (In the case of the
brothel, although there were undoubtedly women inside, they go unmentioned, and the
only participants in the event as it is retold by Boadella are the boys, the bouncers, and
the clients.) In both incidents, Boadella overcomes an obstacle through courage and wit.
By successfully winning these battles against the hostile bouncer and the taunting
goldsmiths, Boadella proves himself an equal to the older men. Therefore, these moments
function as tests of masculinity, or rites of passage that correspond to consecutive stages
in Boadella’s evolution toward manhood. The definition of manhood on display in
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Memorias requires men to be combative, independent, and courageous. The workshop
setting of the second episode implies economic self-sufficiency as a part of this
definition, and the brothel aggressive heterosexuality. In fact, Boadella confesses that his
victory at the brothel played a formative role in his sexual development; the “sensación
sibarítica” resulting from a triumph over a foe oriented him “hacia un concepción del
erotismo en las antípodas de la facilidad” (97). He then assures us of his virility:
“Francamente, por ahora no tengo ninguna queja del camino seguido” (97). In summary,
Boadella’s construction of his coming-of-age upholds values traditionally associated with
Western definitions of masculinity.
At first glance, these rites of passage appear to distinguish boys from men,
apprentices from experts, or cowardly conformists from valiant fighters. However,
according to Bourdieu’s understanding of the social function of the rite of passage, its
main purpose is not to establish a division between those who have and those who have
not undergone the initiation. Instead, it is a practice that inconspicuously reinforces and
naturalizes the division between those groups for whom the rite is intended and those that
are entirely excluded from participation in it (Language and Symbolic Power 117). In the
case of the rites of passage toward manhood narrated in Memorias, the unmentioned
group completely denied access to these rites is women. As Bourdieu explains, rites of
passage - or as Bourdieu renames them “rites of institution” (117) - serve to
institutionalize already existing social divisions, causing us to misrecognize their
arbitrary nature. In effect, they naturalize and consecrate an established order. In
Memorias, Boadella’s rites of passage reinforce a patriarchal order that assigns
essentialist definitions of masculinity and femininity and appoints men to the public
space and women to the domestic sphere.
Evidence of the patriarchal worldview guiding Boadella’s reconstruction of his
past is the similar way in which he describes those women in his life whom he
remembers favorably, such as his family members and his second wife Dolors. His sister,
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for example, was already a “generosa,” and “abnegada” young woman when Boadella
was a small boy, and she “le cuidaba con todo detalle” (241). His sister-in-law was also a
nurturing type. Boadella’s conception came unexpected to his parents, who were
advanced in years, hence the large age gap between him and his siblings. When the
mischievous Albert became too difficult for his aging parents to handle, they sent him to
France to live with his brother and sister-in-law, the latter of whom “se dedicó con
infinita paciencia a la doma de una fiera salvaje, o sea de un servidor” (102). In addition
to taming the rowdy child, she taught him to at least minimally tolerate her expressions of
affection. Even in the present, the fully-grown Boadella continues to enjoy the
maternalistic devotion of his wife Dolors, who cares for the playwright as a mother
would. In fact, Boadella notes that Dolors entered his life only months before the passing
of his mother, and she would “ir templando las cuerdas disonantes de la vida del Bufón
hasta recomponer una nueva armonía” (242). As Boadella presents it, Dolors took over
the domesticating role of his mother by adeptly preparing him nourishing, satisfying
meals, and even, as he notes in his second autobiography, carefully packing his suitcase
for him whenever his Els Joglars duties take him from home (Adiós 190). And Dolors’s
reactions to Boadella’s foolish tantrums are likewise maternalistic: “Su actitud despierta
en mí añejos recuerdos de los irresponsables tiempos de niñez en los que mi madre
mostraba una conducta parecida” (Adiós 190). It is no coincidence that Boadella portrays
as motherly all of the women in his life whom he remembers with fondness. According to
Boadella, it is a woman’s instinct to take care of a man. For example, he recounts in his
second autobiography that amidst a political conversation with him at the breakfast table,
Dolors noticed his empty coffee cup and refilled it without hesitation. He attributes her
unfaltering attention to his needs to “¡Automatismos de especie!” (Adiós 135).
In contrast to the coddling women who have influenced Boadella’s life, his father
was a stoic man who strictly refrained from showing affection - especially physically - to
his son after he was no longer an infant. Boadella praises this behavior as representative
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of a most healthy and natural father-son dynamic: “El espectáculo del padre llenando de
caricias y mimos a hijos de una cierta edad ha tenido siempre a mis ojos unos
componentes patológicos que delatan indudables desequilibrios masculinos” (44). In
Boadella’s view, while it is in a woman’s nature to dedicate herself to the domestication
of man’s “naturaleza agreste” (24) through pampering and affection, a father should teach
his sons normative masculine behavior. One means through which a father must teach, by
Boadella’s account, is violence: “No recuerdo ningún beso de mi padre, ni tampoco
demasiadas carantoñas. Más bien recuerdo una mano grande, descargando unos cachetes
impresionantes, que retumbaban como cañonazos” (44). Thus, in contrast to his mother’s
loving “armas químicas femeninas” (67), employed to tame the rowdy, outspoken men of
the house, his father instructs through physical force, thereby initiating his son in the
masculine aggressiveness that would serve the boy well in his battle against the brothel
bouncer and his fellow goldsmiths.
Boadella’s father also teaches normative masculinity by setting an example of
toughness achieved through emotional distance. For example, Boadella recalls how on
the day his aunt María died his uncle Manel appeared at their door like any other day.
After their usual succinct greeting, Manel “indifferently” informed Boadella’s father of
his wife’s (nicknamed “Manela,” after her husband) death:
-Aquel coño de mujer, que ha estirado la pata.
-¿Quién? -preguntó mi padre con cierta curiosidad.
-La Manela, ¡cojones!
(39)
Without giving his brother a chance to express his sympathy, Manel immediately adds,
“Bah, ¡qué le vamos a hacer!” (39). Never abandoning their customary curtness, the men
quickly shift their conversation to a criticism of the Church, a favorite topic. This
unemotional scene greatly impacted young Boadella, who would sometimes reenact it
when he was alone, playing the roles of both his father and uncle. Later, it would
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influence his plays: “Había en ellas [the plays] escasos desmelenamientos
melodramáticos, y el estilo narrativo estaba presidido siempre por un cierto pudor trágico,
lo que hace sospechar que la escuela de su padre y su tío Manel fue determinante” (44).
As is evidenced by his unsentimental dramatic works, Boadella mastered this lesson in
the “school” of masculinity enacted by the two paternal figures.
When his father died suddenly of heart failure, Boadella, practicing his father’s
teachings, approached the situation without excessive emotion; instead of lamenting his
loss, he celebrated a piece of information shared by his mother. According to her, on the
morning of her husband’s death, “todavía había sido atacada por él con espectacular
fogosidad.” To this Boadella proudly replied: “un final como este merecía sin duda ser
celebrado” (170). This passage, by demonstrating that his father maintained his virility
and dominance (emphasized by the mother’s passive voice - she “was attacked” by him)
up to the day he died, serves to reaffirm his - and by inheritance, Boadella’s masculinity.
In addition to aggressiveness, emotional detachment, and sexual vigor, Boadella’s
lessons in manhood included an introduction to politics. During the harshest period of
repression in the years subsequent to the end of the Civil War, Boadella’s father would
unabashedly criticize the Francoist regime at home in the presence of young Albert. In
spite of his mother’s efforts to prevent him from hearing his father’s dangerous rants,
Boadella understood and interiorized these political denunciations: “Todos los desvelos
de la señora Ángela no consiguieron preservar al pequeño de la contaminación política”
(85). The “political contamination” passed on to him by his father is what led him to his
current fame as a social critic. In the Boadella family, political issues corresponded to the
men, while the mothers and sisters occupied themselves with protecting the domestic
space - or as Boadella calls it, “el segundo claustro materno” (361) - from external
threats. Boadella insists that this division of the sexes into the public and private spheres
is natural when he contrasts men’s “incapacidad ancestral” (249) to perform basic
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housekeeping tasks with his wife’s innate ability to effortlessly take “un lugar inhóspito y
transformarlo instantáneamente en rincón acogedor” (249).
Boadella’s relegation of women to the domestic sphere is even more apparent in
his second autobiography Adiós, Cataluña. Crónica de amor y de guerra, which he
divides into alternating chapters titled “Guerra” and “Amor.” The former recount his
political and artistic battles, and the latter primarily his love story with Dolors.
Throughout the “Guerra” chapters of Adiós, Cataluña Boadella consistently employs
language associated with warfare, referring to his political endeavors as battles and
attacks, to his enemies as generals and combatants, and to himself as a guerrilla fighting
an unbalanced war against Catalan nationalist oppression. The events recounted in the
“Guerra” chapters take place in the public realm, be it a theater, a bar, a newspaper, or a
political assembly. Most of the “Amor” chapters to which Dolors is relegated, on the
other hand, are centered on their rural homestead, which Boadella describes as his refuge
from his public battles: “La Casa Nova actuaba como refugio inexpugnable en el que
todos los ataques externos eran neutralizados…” (Adiós 102). It was Dolors who
converted the cold, stone structure into a warm, inviting sanctuary: “Dolors había
transformado aquellas austeras paredes de piedra . . . en un réplica refinada de la más
excelsa naturaleza. Todo invitaba al sosiego protector” (101). Boadella likewise depicts
Dolors as his source of protection and encouragement amidst the constant onslaught of
hostility and adversity he faced: “. . . la mirada suave y esperanzada de aquella mujer me
animaba a toda clase de alardes; no podía defraudarle; me sentía capaz de entrometerme
en cualquier guerra y salir invicto” (102). In Adiós, Cataluña, then, Dolors and the home
become one. Underlining this association between the home and the feminine is the way
Boadella recounts in Memorias the bittersweet day in 1989 when he, Dolors, and their
children left their first home in the country to move to the nearby town of Jafre. The
sadness they felt upon leaving “el cálido refugio amatorio de su juventud” (431) was
tempered by the fact that Boadella’s close friends and colleagues Ramon Fontseré and
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Dolors Tuneu would be taking their place: “Con el tiempo, otra Dolors pondría de nuevo
una dulce presencia femenina entre la reciedumbre del roble y la piedra de la Casa Nova”
(432). By emphasizing how one Dolors replaces another, he implies their
interchangeability and their belonging to a long line of women who inhabited and
blended into that domestic space.
This restriction of women to the home and their exclusion from the public sphere
reveal the limits of Boadella’s “transgressive” self-rendering, which is expressed through
traditionalist patriarchal discourses which tie his narrative to historical iterations of
hegemonic Spanish nationalism, including National Catholicism. Boadella’s conflation of
femininity with domesticity in his autobiographies is unmistakably reminiscent of
Francoist conceptions of womanhood that were enforced through a multitude of policies
and institutions under the Regime. As historian Giuliana di Febo explains, the restoration
of Spanish women’s maternal and domestic “mission” following the social modernization
that had occurred during the Second Republic was a fundamental component of the
construction of the National Catholic State (220). Because “rechristianization” and
“national regeneration” were assimilated under Franco, the restoration of the “sentido
cristiano de la familia” became the ideological focal point upon which the diverse
factions of the Regime - especially the Church and the Falange - came together (217-19).
The efforts to restore the traditional family centered on controlling, reeducating and
reinserting women into the domestic sphere. This is because women functioned as the
“elemento de articulación y de agregación” linking family, society, and State (220). Thus,
following the end of the Civil War, women’s social role immediately became the nucleus
of the standardization and unification of the different Nationalist forces’ objectives and
discourses (220).35 Febo articulates this understanding of women’s domesticity as a
35 These discourses have historical precedents in Spain, of course. An enlightening study
of one of them is Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel (Vanderbilt University
Press, 2003), in which Roberta Johnson explores the connections between Spanish nationalism
and discourse on gender starting at the turn of the century.
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national concern as the “recuperación de una construcción identitaria tradicional elevada
a responsabilidad ‘nacional’” (222). Because of its centrality to National Catholic
ideology, acceptable women’s behavior was highly codified under Franco, through laws
like the Fuero del Trabajo keeping women out of the workplace (historian Susanna
Tavera García calls this “exilio doméstico” (240)); subsidies rewarding high birth rates
(so long as the mother was not employed outside of the home); organizations like the
Falange’s Sección Femenina; sex-segregated schooling; and “manuales de formación,” to
name a few examples. The ways Boadella constructs idealized femininity in Memorias
aligns with Francoist conceptions, including, as we have seen, his reduction of
womanhood to motherhood, his distinction between maternal and paternal roles in child
rearing, and his relegation of women to the domestic space.
Another of the feminine qualities promoted by Francoist institutions was selfdenial, or, as it was described by Sección Femenina leader Pilar Primo de Rivera,
“‘Alentar y ayudar’ a los mandos masculinos sin ponerse con ellos ‘de igual a igual’”
(qtd. in Febo 231). Dolors’s disinterestedness is a recurring theme in Boadella’s
autobiographies. According to the playwright, “El desinterés que siente Dolors por sus
propias cosas se transforma en todo lo contrario cuando se trata de los demás” (Adiós 99).
Because it is her instinct to fulfill others’ needs before her own, she sometimes forgets
about herself entirely: “su considerable interés por los demás y esa facilidad natural por
olvidarse de sí misma” (163). And as Boadella recounts a heart surgery Dolors
underwent, he links her fragile health to her concern for others, noting that her heart was
repaired only so she could “seguir en el futuro gastándolo en sus preocupaciones por los
demás” (220). Besides her own heart, the greatest proof of Dolors’s self-abnegation is her
own career as a painter, which she put aside to the extent required for her to dedicate
herself fully to caring for Boadella, their children, and their home. According to Adiós,
Cataluña, during the hours that Dolors underwent heart surgery, a distraught Boadella
reflected on everything she had given up for him in order that he could pursue his
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passion. He momentarily feels regretful of his selfishness (225). However, in spite of this
fleeting sensation of guilt, Boadella maintains that Dolors’s self-denial is natural and
correct, and that it would impossible for him, as a man, to give up his career ambitions so
that his female partner could pursue hers: “La realidad estadística resulta despiadada en
este sentido: nunca un hombre es capaz de una renuncia así por una mujer. La paradoja se
produce cuando una mujer tampoco es capaz de ello; percibimos entonces que algo se ha
estropeado en su condición femenina” (197). He reiterates this point in a conversation
with television personality Fernando Sánchez Dragó, published as Dios los cría y ellos
hablan de sexo, drogas, España, corrupción when he attributes his wife’s dedication to
his professional goals as “su natural generoso que forma parte del impulso femenino”
(Dios 178). In Boadella’s view, a woman who fails to meet Dolors’s level of
disinterestedness is a “damaged” woman.
What is worse, Boadella finds, is that such defective femininity threatens to
disrupt the natural male-female balance in a relationship, in the same way that an overly
timid man does. Fortunately for him, though, when he met Dolors, “…aquella mujer
exigía del hombre arrojo y protagonismo en las decisiones que le eran propias de su
especie” (78). Not only did Dolors allow Boadella the prominent decision-making role in
the relationship, but he successfully fulfilled the role of the dominant partner, thus
avoiding the tendency he has observed of weak-willed men bringing out destructive
ambition in their female counterparts, as exemplified by Dolors’s antithesis, Lady
Macbeth, who represents “un curioso y abundante reducto femenino, cuando una mujer
experimenta el apocamiento de su macho” (132). Throughout his autobiographies and
other writings Boadella highlights he and Dolors’s complementarity, contrasting his
exhibitionist tendencies with her discretion, his self-centeredness with her selflessness.
While he frequently expresses this dichotomy self-deprecatingly, praising her
conduct as superior to and more civilized than his own, his insistence upon the biological
nature of their differences serves to uphold a gender binary deliberately constructed and
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enforced under Francoism. According to the Sección Femenina’s 1937 statute, the
organization aimed to train women to “‘servir de perfecto complemento al hombre’ (qtd.
in Febo 229). Another example of Boadella’s understanding of gender within this
traditional binary is his memory of his parents’ opposing views of the post-war political
situation. While his mother had resigned to life under the dictatorship, which she
correctly predicted would be long-lived, his father obstinately refused to accept the
reality of the Republic’s defeat. Boadella wondered whether his parents’ different
responses to their political reality stemmed from sexual difference: “Estas percepciones
tan opuestas sobre la realidad de la vida, y las derivaciones polémicas que siempre
comportaban, subsistieron hasta los separó la muerte, y nunca supe si eran a causa de al
genética macho-hembra, o si sencillamente había surgido del fracaso de los ideales
republicanos, un hecho que tan profundamente afectó por siempre jamás a mi padre”
(Memorias 21). His later experience with Dolors proved correct his original hunch:
“Muchos años más tarde, al repetirse los mismos esquemas con mi querida mujer, he
comprendido definitivamente que por lo menos eso no fue responsabilidad de Franco”
(21). Here Boadella suggests that there is an essential feminine worldview that transcends
generations and changing socio-political contexts, and that this worldview is biologically
determined. This naturalization of gender complementarity was a key component of
Francoist ideology.
Anthropologist Jordi Roca i Girona points out that the notion of
complementariness was a mere euphemism for inequality, and he aims to debunk the
biological determinist theories of sex differences that were universalized by the Church
and promoted under the dictatorship: “…el significado de ‘ser mujer’ varía cultural e
históricamente y . . . el género es una realidad social que siempre debe de enmarcarse en
un contexto determinado” (334). During the early autarkic period of the Francoist State,
explains Roca i Girona, the absence of consciousness of alternatives to the gender
definitions made compulsory by the regime encouraged “un cierto hábito, una
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mecanización y automatización de la conducta,” which could be mistaken for instinctual
behavior (25).
Thus, it is reasonable to assume that many of the traits that Boadella most
admires in his wife, and which he attributes to her feminine nature, were instilled in her
by the institutions under which she was raised, which coincide in part with the same
apparatuses that Boadella is famous for supposedly “transgressing.” It is my contention
that it is highly problematic to define any public figure as “anti-francoist” without taking
into consideration his treatment of gender, which was, as we have seen, such a central
component of the regime’s ideology. Although Boadella’s work has undoubtedly
critiqued other aspects of the regime, including censorship and its glorification of Spain’s
imperial past, and although Boadella certainly does not go so far as to promote a return to
the restrictive policies governing women’s behavior under Franco, by upholding
Francoist standards of femininity and describing the ideal woman (Dolors) in terms
unmistakably similar to those employed by organizations like the Sección Feminina, he
reveals the limitations of his jester-like transgression.
The “Incestuous” Nation
If Boadella’s adherence to the same gender constructs that upheld the National
Catholic State is not enough to call into question his reputation as a transgressive social
actor, his reactionary treatment of the women who eschewed or disobeyed this restrictive
definition of femininity certainly is. In Memorias the women who serve as foils to Dolors
are the progressives, Catalan nationalists, and feminists with whom Boadella kept
company during his first marriage, and his descriptions of them differ radically from the
way he portrays Dolors, his mother, his sister, and his sister-in-law, all of whom, as we
have seen, were essentially maternalistic in Boadella’s eyes. For example, he remembers
with disgust the late night discussions with his former leftist friends in which he took part
in his younger days:
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Cuando las discusiones derivaban hacia el sexo, unas muchachas
desgreñadas y mal vestidas tomaban violentamente el
protagonismo, exhibiendo un lenguaje trufado de palabrotas, y
refiriéndose a nuestros instrumentos reproductores como quien
habla de un producto de charcutería. Después, para rematar la
noche, el acto más transgresor consistía, invariablemente, en
cambiar de pareja al ir a dormir. (Memorias 154)
These women repulsed Boadella because, not only did they disobey the patriarchal
mandates of maintaining their physical attractiveness and exercising self-restraint in their
social interactions, but they were also promiscuous. Merely being in the presence of these
individuals produced in him “un cierto asco de mí mismo” (154). In contrast to the
progre women’s aggressive sexuality and coarse ways, Boadella’s feminine ideal, which
he fantasized about since his childhood, is subtly sensual:
Morena, manos largas y finas, ojos negros dulces, expresión serena
algo distante, más bien delgada, hombros reducidos, cintura fina,
ancas generosas pero sin glúteos sobresalientes, pecho moderado,
axilas y otras intimidades pobladas de vello negro, piel suave de
perfume inexplicable, elegante más que llamativa, apenas gallarda,
aire sereno. . . . (Adiós 36-7)
Boadella’s ideal woman is soft, docile, angelic, and attractive though not overtly sexual.
Much too his delight, when Boadella met Dolors he realized that he had finally
discovered a flesh and blood version of the pillow he once imagined as his future wife:
“No había diferencias significativas. . . Era la réplica exacta de mis primeros ajustes con
la almohada” (67). The way he describes their courtship, in which he pursued her until
she became “una doncella rendida y subyugada por mi neófita pasión” (36), recalls his
memory of his father’s sexual dominance over his mother. Along with sexually
submissive and angelic (“el halo de Dolors” (66)), the most frequent descriptor used by
Boadella when discussing Dolors is “delicada.” It is in this area particularly where his
first wife, Marta, failed to fit his mold: “Antes de dar con ella [Dolors], fui atraído por su
imagen opositora. Menuda, gallarda, extrovertida, de formas rollizas y hombros anchos,
mujer arrojada donde las haya” (39). Even during his detour with Marta, though, his
prototype had always remained in the back of his mind: “aunque las urgencias amatorias
me llevaron de forma transitoria a conformarme con algo muy distinto del modelo
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original, me mantuve siempre fiel a la imagen de referencia” (37). By Boadella’s account,
Marta, a former Scout leader and mediocre housekeeper (244), eventually became overly
influenced by their leftist friends’ attitudes and behaviors, leading to an irresolvable
conflict between them (190-1).
Along with the progres and Marta, Boadella identifies a number of former Els
Joglars actresses who deviated from the standards of femininity exemplified by Dolors.
These are the few women who appear in Adiós, Cataluña’s male-dominated “Guerra”
chapters, and they are seemingly unwelcome there. In one such chapter Boadella recounts
a fluctuating rivalry between former Els Joglars members Gloria Rognoni and Montserrat
Torres. He refers to the two women as “las dos coléricas” (74), “las hembras exaltadas,”
or “las dos sulfuradas féminas” (76), and expresses pity for the poor male actors who
experienced their wrathful “arañazos” when the two women occasionally joined forces
against them. In one “frenética” fight between Rognoni and Torres, Boadella recalls, the
women’s “desmedido afán protagonista” led them to remove their clothing in “un desafío
exhibicionista de carácter erótico,” competing for the male troupe members’ attention
(74). Although the men enjoyed the show, Boadella had no interest in them beyond such
visual consumption, for “se trataba de señoritas espectaculares para usufructo exclusivo
de incautos” (75). The actresses are portrayed as one part hysterical nymphomaniac, one
part sexual object. In another example, when Boadella reproduces the announcement he
made to an early problematic group of Els Joglars actors that he would be seeking out
new actors with whom to work, his complaints about the current members focus
especially on the women’s sexual indiscretions: “una exhibición. Me fastidiaba tener que
soportar a Elisa ensayando desnuda y embarazada, sólo con unas bragas, o no me parecía
honesto que el dinero de la caja sirviera, sin mi autorización, para que una señorita de la
compañía abortara en Londres. Mi irritación ante estas y otras cosas semejantes ha
significado para vosotros la certificación del abyecto retrógrado” (92). Finally, in Dios
los cría, Boadella tells Sánchez Dragó about a female member of the company who, in
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spite of her widely known promiscuity, had the nerve to be offended by an action that she
interpreted as - but which he did not intend as - sexual harassment (64-5). After narrating
her exaggerated reaction to the situation (“Salió disparada a mi encuentro” (64)), he goes
on to reiterate the extent of her licentiousness, as if to suggest that regardless of his
harmless intentions, through her sexual behavior she had already waived her right to
respectful treatment anyway. These three examples combined point toward an overall
portrayal of theater women as tending toward promiscuity and exhibitionism. Yet again,
he positions them in direct contrast to Dolors. Unlike so many of the showy women of
Els Joglars’s past, “Para una personalidad tan especialmente discreta como la suya, la
exhibición significaría un panorama terrorífico” (115). Further, Dolors “no abrigaba ni
una sola inclinación hacia las modas libertarias” (78). In fact, Boadella says that until he
met Dolors, he had never perceived “algunas hondonadas de la naturaleza femenina,” for
the theater women he had spent so many years working with “hacen su efecto como
hembras, pero la deformación profesional acostumbra a convertirlas en llamativas
simulaciones de mujer” (78). In Boadella’s view, true womanhood and the theater
professions are generally incompatible.
This notion of women not belonging in the world of theater is explored by Patricia
W. O’Connor in her study of the double censure experienced by women playwrights
under Franco. In addition to the censorship laws that all artists dealt with during this
period, O’Connor uncovers the unofficial and frequently unacknowledged “otra censura”
that women playwrights experienced during the dictatorship as part of the broader efforts
to “retraditionalize” Spain by excluding women from the public sphere. She points
toward the prohibition of certain topics for women artists, as well as Francoism’s
institutionalization of sexual divisions that naturalized essentialist definitions of the male
as active creator and the female as passive complement (100). O’Connor then identifies a
number of reasons for the theater establishment’s particularly slow progress in embracing
women as creators. Because theater is a particularly verbal, physically active, and public
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art form that frequently deals with social and political issues, this genre was perceived as
especially incompatible with conventional definitions of femininity (101-2). Whereas
poetry or narrative could be produced by women during their breaks from domestic labor,
being involved in theater entailed abandoning the home and entering the public sphere.
Thus, while the latter form of literary expression was deemed acceptable, women
involved in theater - historically associated with outsiders and immorality as it was risked being viewed as impure and unchaste (105-6). The opposition Boadella fashions
between Dolors safely tucked away at home expressing her creativity through cooking,
decorating, and painting in her spare time, and the vulgar actresses on stage drawing
attention to their bodies suggests that women do not belong in the public artistic space of
theater. Returning to Cresswell’s theory of transgression, it could be argued that
Boadella’s reactionary treatment of the actresses reveals the playwright’s adherence to a
traditional patriarchal understanding of that space. The women’s perceived
inappropriateness has as much to do with their being “out of place” on the stage as with
their actions themselves. When in Adiós, Cataluña Boadella fondly remembers a prank
he pulled with a fellow male cast member in which they urinated on audience members’
heads during a performance, the image he creates is one of fraternity, comedy, and boyish
rebellion. The actresses’ behaviors, in contrast, are depicted as grotesque and ridiculous.
Thus, in his portrayal of the former Els Joglars actresses, he winds up revealing their
transgression of a male-dominated social space and his own investment in protecting it
from female outsiders, once again undermining his own autobiographical performance as
transgressor.
His upholding of hegemonic patriarchal perceptions of public spaces extends
beyond the theater. In Dios los cría he skewers female PSOE politicians for not being
sexually desirable: “Son hembras realmente temibles. Puestos a fantasear, ¡a ver quién es
el varón masoquista que sueña en tener una aventura con una de esas ministras! Si fuera
cuestión de escoger amante en una isla desierta, preferiría antes a Rubalcaba” (109). The
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notion that a woman politician’s merit should be evaluated based on her sexual
attractiveness is one more example of how Boadella’s discourse on gender is far from
transgressive, but rather upholds the persistent belief that women are “out of place” in the
public sphere, thus contributing to the marginalization of women politicians and artists.36
There is a passage in Adiós, Cataluña in which Boadella does briefly recognize his
traditionalist tendencies and recognizes that probably his upbringing has made it difficult
for him to adapt to the social progress that feminist activism has achieved in
contemporary Spanish society. Yet he immediately counterbalances that momentary
insight when he laments the societal changes that accompany the movement toward
equality between sexes: “El hombre ya no recibirá más aquella mirada dulcemente
maternal sobre sus insensateces (que tanto le reconfortaba), y la mujer caminará sola, sin
la protección fachendosa y also lisonjera que tanto halagaba” (117). Unable to recognize
that lingering machismo is precisely the cause of the violence against women which
compels them to seek protection, Boadella assumes that the need for male protection
while outside the safety of the home is inherent to the female sex, just as the need for
maternal coddling is inherent to the male sex. After inserting an imagined response from
a feminist to his call for a return to traditional gender roles, he feigns a response to her:
“¡A sus órdenes señora! Si me da usted su permiso… me voy con Dolors.” (117) The
intended mockery of his response to the militant feminist voice is derived from the
apparent incongruity of a woman as sergeant, the military being yet another exclusively
male domain in which women are out of place. The fact that so many scholars and
journalists eagerly pronounce Boadella an iconoclast in spite of his exceedingly
36 A woman politician for whom Boadella does confess his admiration is Esperanza
Aguirre (1952), former Senate President, Minister of Education and Culture, and President of the
Community of Madrid for the Partido Popular. However, it is noteworthy that he ascribes her
political successes to the stereotypically feminine attribute of intuition: “Tengo la sensación de
que es una mujer con una intuición política extraordinaria.” See: “Albert Boadella: ‘Los politicos
actúan para los medios’” (Interview with Esther Peñas) in Asturias Mundial.
http://www.asturiasmundial.com/noticia/36585/albert-boadella-politicos-actuan-para-medios/
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conservative attitudes toward women is proof of the still “misrecognized” nature of
patriarchal constructs even in present-day democratic Spain.37
As is indicated by the above cited commentary on the PSOE’s female
representatives, in Boadella’s view, the entrance of women in the public world of politics
or theater not only corrupts those women’s femininity; it also diminishes their male
counterparts’ masculinity. When Boadella compares PSOE’s Secretary General Alfredo
Pérez Rubalcaba to his female colleagues in his assessment of their sexual appeal, he
intends to underscore the repulsion he feels toward the women, but the comparison has
the additional effect of emasculating Rubalcaba by conflating him with the women with
whom he shares a workplace. This emasculation of men as a consequence of women’s
entrance into traditionally male-dominated sectors, by Boadella’s account, is especially
pervasive in leftist factions, where feminism is comparatively most welcome. One change
in men’s behavior brought about by feminism and that Boadella finds especially
disturbing is their increased involvement in childbirth. Boadella adheres to the belief that
a father need not be present at the birth of his child; when his first son was born he stayed
away from the hospital, for “No era difícil deducir que no me habían necesitado para
nada” (349). But since then “El feminismo ha creado un tipo de híbrido masculino que
habla de las incidencias del embarazo y el parto como si las compartiera con su pareja . .
.,” and it is a recent development that Boadella abhores: “Sinceramente, estos presuntos
machos que no pueden mantenerse en su sitio me inspiran un repelús irreprimible”
(Memorias 349). Women’s invasion of historically male public spheres has initiated a
reciprocal effect in which men are moving into what were once exclusively feminine
realms, and as a result are in part renouncing their masculinity. The fact that he reiterates
37 In Women in Contemporary Spain (Manchester University Press, 1997), Anny
Brooksbank Jones discusses how the lack of recognition of gender constructs and will to make
the profound social changes necessary to achieve gender equality even within leftist political
movements has been a recurring challenge for Spanish feminists.
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the absurdity of men’s presence in gynecological clinics later in Dios los cría (24-5)
suggests it is a genuine concern for him and not a mere passing comment. This is because
the division of male and female social spheres carries broader national implications for
him. Just as Francoist ideologues viewed the maintenance of strictly divided gendered
spaces as necessary for the health of the nation, Boadella links the public-private
separation of sexes to nationalist politics when he delegitimizes Catalan nationalism by
relegating it to the private, hence feminine, realm. For Boadella, Catalan identity
becomes a problem only when it is elevated beyond harmless collective sentiment to take
the form of a political movement: “la apropiación indebida de los sentimientos populares,
manipulados para convertirlos en política. … Son sentimientos que, mantenidos en su
propio ámbito de intimidad, pueden configurar unos parámetros agradables para la vida,
pero que, aumentados hasta atribuirles categoría pública y administrativa, degeneran en la
entronización de la insustancialidad…” (Memorias 393). Unlike Spanish identity, which
is rightfully expressed through public institutionalization, Catalan identity belongs in the
personal, domestic category. Like women, Catalan nationalism is out of place as a public
actor.
Boadella justifies leftist and Catalanist exclusion from legitimate political activity
by demonstrating that they do not fulfill the requisites of normative masculinity. One of
the ways that Boadella associates Catalanism with divergence from his definition of
masculinity is by observing in it homosexual tendencies. In Adiós, Cataluña he makes
clear his rejection of homosexuality by defining his own sexual identity as its antithesis.
He declares, “La sola idea de compartir el olor u otras humanidades más íntimas del
macho antagonista me produce náuseas. Soy totalmente refractario al contacto físico con
varones, y en la actualidad hasta me cuesta soportar esa infausta costumbre del beso
masculino” (Adiós 39). And he later adds, “Si pienso que hubiera podido salir maricón,
me quedo consternado, no alcanzo a comprender la excitada felicidad que aparentan;
claro que, recíprocamente, ellos deben de sentir lo mismo, pero al revés” (100). Not only
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does his use of the demeaning word “maricón” reveal some level of hostility toward
homosexuality, but by saying that gay couples “aparentan” the happiness that they feel
together, Boadella subtly shades their happiness with doubt, as if, just like the theater
women whom he deems simulacra of true womanhood, their romantic relationship were a
performance. And although the final statement points to his accepting that homosexual
partners are capable of reciprocating the same emotions as a heterosexual partners, the
extraneous addition of the final words “al revés” hints at homosexuality’s unnaturalness;
it is described as the “reverse” of what is “normal,” namely heterosexuality. In Memorias
Boadella attributes his aversion to the Catalan modernisme architecture to an indefinable
quality it possess that provokes a “curioso deleite . . . entre los homosexuales” (38). He
then goes on to speculate about the “homosexualidad reprimida y sublimada” (37) of the
modernisme’s star Antoni Gaudí. Boadella is well aware of the importance of the
modernisme aesthetic as visual representation of a distinct Catalan identity. Thus, his
derogatory designation of the architectural style as gay extends to the catalanismo
cultural movement that embraces it. Here it becomes clear that sexuality is a key
component of Boadella’s articulation of the illegitimacy of catalanidad and his rejection
of it.
Another example of this is the language that Boadella employs in his analysis of
Jordi Pujol’s political motivations and his effects on Catalan politics and society. First, he
jokes that unlike most boys who dream of becoming firemen or race car drivers when
they grow up, Pujol, shaped by the elite Catalanist social class in which he was brought
up, always envisioned being president of the Generalitat. Later, says Boadella, instead
being stimulated by fantasies about attractive women, Pujol’s adolescent “libido alcanza
las máximas cotas cuando se imagina un día cantando Els segadors ante una multitud que
le vitorea como President o siendo investido en un Parlament que entonces permanecía
sellado” (Adiós 153). Els Joglars mocks Pujol’s supposedly perverse obsession with
Catalonia and desire for power in a comical scene of Ubu president in which the
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politician, right after rejecting his wife’s sexual advances at bedtime, instead dreams
about having an erotic encounter with a senyera as the famous operatic soprano
Montserrat Caballé serenades him (Ubú 202). With such a depraved leader exerting his
influence for so many years, Boadella reasons, it comes as no surprise that Catalan
politics have grown increasingly corrupt. As Boadella describes it, Pujol “practicó una
forma de mando ciertamente muy peculiar, basada en una relación populista casi
incestuosa, pero, por esa misma razón, insalubre y extremadamente tóxica” (Adiós 154).
One aspect of the “toxic” environment resulting from Pujol’s long reign, explains
Boadella, is that political parties that should be healthily at odds with one another are all
united under the Catalanist creed (154-55), creating “un clima que ha estimulado la
perversidad en las relaciones” (Dios 283).
Even before Pujol’s reign, though, Catalan society included incestuous elements,
though under the dictatorship the political perversion was limited to Catalanist circles and
had not yet been institutionalized. Boadella knows this environment well, for he was
exposed to it as a child. In the first “Amor” chapter of Adiós, Cataluña he remembers the
exhilaration he felt when his father took him to view a clandestine group performing a
sardana (a traditional Catalan dance) in a small Barcelona plaza as a form of resistance to
the dictatorship’s cultural repression. He remembers with especial clarity the image of his
cousin Carmina as she danced with the group, and he links his admiration for her graceful
figure and movements to the allure that drew him into the Catalanist milieu. He identifies
his witnessing of the sardana as “el inicio de una dolencia afectiva que pasaría por
distintas patologías hasta su completa curación, cincuenta años después” (25). After
experiencing it for the first time, Boadella became addicted to the the thrill that came
from taking part in an underground, subversive activity: “La palabra català sobrellevaba
una mezcla de connotaciones sentimentales y furtivas, con incentivos suficientes para
estimular la libido de los que estaban en el ajo” (24). This libidinal quality gave
Catalanism the power to “fomentar arraigo y dependencia de la promiscuidad colectiva.
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Su cálido olor incestuoso propicia un fuerte síndrome de abstinencia cuando uno se aleja
del rebaño” (25). Thus, his incestuous attraction to Carmina paralleled his pathological
dependence on an endogamic social environment (in Memorias he calls it the “virus de la
endogamia” (172)) and an unnatural sentimental connection to the patria. Fifty years
later, after he has finally broken all of his ties to Catalan nationalism, he asserts that his
“única y amada patria acabaría siendo Dolors” (50), thus continuing his discursive
linking of sexuality and nation.
That his adhesion to the incestuous nationalist family began during his childhood
and ended with adulthood points to yet another way that Boadella discounts Catalanist
activism as a valid political movement by emasculating them: infantilization.
Progressivism is not saved from this dismissive portrayal; when Boadella diagnoses adult
participation in leftist activism as “una adolescencia demasiado larga” (Memorias 155)
and defines the concept of solidarity as a “tema para niños” (44), he insinuates that
members of progressive movements have failed to mature into fully independent, adult
men. Boadella’s assessment that forms of resistance to the Spanish State - be they leftist
or separatist - are analogous to outbursts by unruly children means that the state can (and
should) legitimately implement violence in order to maintain its authority and compel the
rowdy boys to obey. In Dios los cría Boadella bemoans the reduction of the military’s
presence (the same institution he famously denounced with La torna in 1977) throughout
the democratic period, and proposes the reintroduction of compulsory military service for
young men, which was discontinued in 2001 under Aznar: “. . . Ha sido un error suprimir
la mili y mucho más en el momento actual, con esos reinos de taifas autonómicos que
padecemos. Sería fantástico llamar ahora a filas a la juventud y así a los niñatos
nacionalistas que se han hartado de quemar banderas españolas les tocaría jurarla delante
de todo el cuartel” (88). From Boadella’s point of view, the solution to the problem of
separatism in Spain is the introduction of the disorderly sectors to a rite of manhood
involving the same type of physical intimidation that he had experienced from older men
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on his path to adulthood. Thus, Boadella establishes a parallel between his father’s
legitimate implementation of violence in his rearing of Boadella and the state’s use of its
legitimate form of violence (the military) in the formation of obedient young men,
making glaringly obvious the links between the maintenance of a patriarchal order and of
the state’s authority.
The connections that Boadella establishes between sexual deviance and
challenges to Spain’s borders and state powers are not unfamiliar. As Joane Nagel
reminds us, “Nationalist boundaries are also sexual boundaries” (472). Socially
acceptable, heterosexual masculine and feminine behaviors constitute one of the pillars of
nationalism; thus, non-heterosexualities “tend not to be integrated into nationalist
ideologies and imaginings of the nation, but rather are likely to be defined as
characteristics of marginal, alien “others,” haunting the edges of the nation, and seen as
potential threats to national solidarity” (473). As an example of this gendered nationalist
discourse, she cites the prevalent conception that nations have of their own women as
pure and maternalistic and men as virile in valiant in contrast to the promiscuous women
and weak, degenerate men of other nations (472). Boadella’s portrayal of Catalan
nationalists and progressives as sexual others thus serves to emphasize their national
otherness and the threat they pose to the Spanish nation. Boadella’s conflation of
normative masculinity with legitimate power reveals his incapacity to free himself from
the patriarchal structures that go hand-in-hand with nationalism.
By characterizing the Catalanist political environment in which he was once a
participant as a suffocating, incestuous family, Boadella sets the stage for a third rite of
passage chronicled in Memorias, an event that represents his initial break from that
family. In November 1977, during Spain’s transitional period following Franco’s death,
Els Joglars’s had been touring with La torna, a satirical play that was critical of the still
powerful military, and which led to Boadella’s arrest. Tens of thousands of citizens
gathered in Barcelona in support of Boadella and to protest against the censorship laws
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that had hindered artistic expression throughout the dictatorial period. Boadella’s plight
served as a moving symbol of the regime’s repression at a pivotal moment in the
country’s history; thus, the La torna controversy provided a great deal of momentum to
political activists striving to shape Spain’s future during the Transition, bringing together
theater troupes (who all went on strike), leftist political parties, universities, and civic
groups, all in the name of freedom of expression. Boadella expresses appreciation for the
support that his colleagues in the theater world gave him; however, as the months passed,
he began to realize the protests were causing him more harm than good by making the
military feel threatened, prompting its leaders to even more adamantly insist that
Boadella serve a potential six-year sentence. Boadella says that things turned for the
worse as soon as the leftist political parties involved themselves in his predicament, and
he quickly grew skeptical of them after they repeatedly promised him that their political
maneuvering would promptly free him, yet never did. Therefore, rather than passively
await his sentencing at Barcelona’s Modelo prison throughout the length of the legal
battle, as Boadella believes his so-called supporters wished for him to do, he rejected the
role of martyr of progressism that had been assigned to him and devised a plot to escape.
First, with the help of his lawyer and Dolors, he feigned a grave, yet difficult-to-diagnose,
digestive illness, obligating prison officials to have him admitted to a nearby hospital
where the doctors, complicit in the resistance movement, invented excuses to prolong his
stay. Then, on February 27, 1978, during a moment of carelessness on the part of the
prison guard assigned to his hospital room that afternoon, Boadella donned a disguise that
Dolors had sneaked in, slipped out of the building, and after a month in hiding at a
friend’s home fled to France. Boadella escaped from the hospital just one day before he
and the other Joglars (who, unlike Boadella, were only on probation, not held in jail)
were to appear before the military tribunal for sentencing. Although Boadella warned all
of them of his plan to flee before the trial, only two followed his lead and exiled to
France; the other four appeared in court, were immediately detained, and subsequently
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sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Though Boadella fails to understand why the
four actors would “entregarse como corderos al matadero” (299), he suspects that their
manipulate lawyers convinced them to do it so as to escalate the controversy in the
interest of not only advancing their political agenda, but advancing their own careers
(286). Boadella’s lawyer’s approach to Boadella’s defense, in contrast, focused on
technicalities and appeasing the military officials (taking advantage of his personal and
professional relationships with them), with the ultimate goal being to free Boadella from
prison as efficiently as possible. When that approach looked sure to fail, he shifted gears
and assisted Boadella in his escape.
Boadella’s incarceration and subsequent escape can be interpreted as another
phase in Boadella’s path to full-fledged masculinity. The prison constitutes another allmale environment in which Boadella is forced to confront an aggressive male adversary,
represented in this instance by the military. And yet again, Boadella successfully
overcomes the challenge facing him through a daring and elaborate scheme. Also, while
his two earlier rites of passage also occur in public, as opposed to domestic, spaces (the
street outside the brothel and the factory), this third rite demonstrates Boadella’s entrance
into an even more prominently public - and highly political - setting. What is most
remarkable about Boadella’s own telling of this experience in Memorias is how he
reframes it so that his rebellious actions are directed more against the demonstrators
supposedly exploiting his hardship to reach their own broader goals (of achieving
freedom of expression) than against the belligerent military that sought to silence him and
that was undoubtedly also using the occasion of La torna to demonstrate its might in the
face of social transformations that would reduce its power. Thus, instead of a tale of
resistance to residual Francoist institutions and forms of repression, in Memorias the La
torna scandal is reinterpreted as the story of how Boadella gained freedom from the
provincial, incestuous political movements that had for so many years conditioned his
worldview and artistic endeavors.
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A key component of this step toward ideological and social independence - or
political manhood - is his adoption of new enemies against whom to define himself.
Francoist institutions represented the ultimate enemy during Boadella’s youth; as a child
he witnessed how his father suffered the Republicans’ loss, and as a young man he
participated in cultural resistance activities (including La torna, which criticized the
military, of course). However, in a curious reversal, the majority of the sympathetic
characters in the events surrounding his arrest as they appear in Memorias were affiliated
with the military. Although he does lampoon the military officers responsible for his
detention and calls the judge overseeing his trial “un tipo siniestro” (279), he says of the
more than fifty civil guards who took turns watching over Boadella in his hospital room:
“En general su trato fue exquisito y me hicieron la estancia tan agradable como pudieron”
(292). And he even expresses guilt for the punishment that fell upon the guard who was
on duty on the afternoon of his escape, for he was “un hombre simpático y amable, que
siempre había sido muy generoso conmigo” (296). The hero of the story, though, is his
lawyer Federico de Valenciano, a retired military commander who participated in the
1936 Nationalist coup d’état that initiated the Spanish Civil War. In spite of his personal
history and his ongoing professional and personal connections with the military, he offers
to take on Boadella’s case pro bono, and Boadella puts his trust in him after their first
meeting, in which he found de Valenciano to be honorable, dignified, eloquent, and
altruistic like the “hidalgo . . . de aquella Castilla quimérica” that he was (277). De
Valencia would come to be one of exiled Boadella’s most loyal friends after his former
supporters turned against him.
In contrast to the Francoists who pleasantly surprised Boadella by treating him
respectfully despite the circumstances, Boadella became increasingly exasperated with
his soon-to-be-former political allies. Because only a month and a half before Boadella’s
detention an amnesty law had gone into effect releasing political prisoners throughout
Spain, Boadella was an exception among the prisoners in the Modelo prison. In
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Memorias he recounts that even at that time he considered himself lucky to be saved from
the wearisome pontification of the recently released leftist prisoners: “Prefería no
encontrarme entre políticos [political prisoners], pues me hubiera resultado muy duro
tener que aguantar la pesadez de los dogmáticos izquierdosos también allí dentro” (283).
It did not take him long to come to believe that most of the “scoundrels” who surrounded
him inside the prison were more trustworthy than “la mayoría de los exhibicionistas de la
solidaridad” who protested outside (283). One example of the ways in which many of
Boadella’s supposed allies behaved ignobly occurred less than one month after he was
detained, when he received a letter from the Instituto del Teatro, where he had been
employed as a professor, initiating his unpaid leave of absence and sending he and Dolors
into poverty. Years later, when the Boadella would run into Herman Bonnin the director
of the institute who had approved the discontinuation of his salary, he was astonished by
Bonnin’s friendly, nonchalant attitude toward him, who acted as if nothing had ever
happened. He chalks up Bonnin’s behavior to “típico buen rollo progre” culture
(Memorias 282) and contrasts him with the Instituto del Teatro’s previous director, who
was a Francoist: “Estoy seguro de que el anterior director franquista, Guillermo DíazPlaja, no hubiera permitido nunca algo así” (282). In another instance, this one occurring
during Boadella’s exile in France, Ferran Rañé, one of the former Joglars who had also
sought refuge there, betrayed his former director when he participated in an interview that
was published with libelous statements about Boadella in it and later refused to request
that the false parts of the damaging portrayal be retracted. The interview was but one
piece of what Boadella characterizes as a smear campaign brought against him in
Catalonia during his time in France instigated by a handful of journalists with the
collaboration of the now estranged former Joglars members and his ex-wife, and
embraced eagerly by much of the Catalan left who viewed his jailbreak as a self-serving
affront to their greater cause. Significantly, the only journalist that Boadella recalls
voicing disapproval of the attacks on Boadella in the Catalan press wrote for the Madrid-
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based weekly Sábado Gráfico. It seemed that he had become a persona non grata in his
home region.
As a response to his compatriots’ depiction of him as a traitor, Boadella made “la
decisión de dar un inmenso corte de mangas al público” (316). Dressed in a tailcoat and
bowler hat and with a photographer in tow, Boadella headed to Canet beach, where
Catalonia’s mountains were visible in the background, and posed for a set of three
photographs that he would later send to the Catalan press. (He includes the photos in
Memorias.) In the first, he makes the mano cornuto gesture (“el gesto italiano del
cornudo”), in the second the bras d’honneur (“corte de mangas”), and in the third he tips
his hat as he flashes his buttocks to the camera. The aggressive phallic connotations of
the bras d’honneur, along with the cuckold and buttocks gestures’ implication of his
opponents’ lack of manliness suggests that Boadella’s way of enacting revenge on his
enemies is to call into question their masculinity. The photos constitute a performance of
Boadella’s male dominance over his foes. After the publication of the photos, Boadella
“Ya no sería más uno de los suyos…” (316), as he would from then on only be viewed by
his fellow Catalans as “un bufón repulsivo, insolidario…” (317). Thus, the publication of
Boadella’s photographic insult to Catalonia is the conclusion of a rite of passage in which
his rejection of the infantile, incestuous, and tribal-like (in his view) world of Catalan
politics and new status as a fully grown, ideologically independent “buffoon” symbolize
his political “coming of age.”
In Service of the King
Returning to Cresswell’s concept of transgression, after the La torna incident and
the events that unfolded in its wake, Boadella ends up both literally and figuratively “out
of place” in Catalonia. In this final section I will reframe the narrative to locate
Boadella’s position within the broader state-level institutional context. It is significant
that Boadella’s reinterpretation of his arrest and jailbreak reconfigures the anti-francoist
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resistance movement so that it winds up becoming the hegemonic force that Boadella
transgresses, while by the end of his account state institutions (represented by the loyal
and competent Valenciano and the friendly prison guards) wind up appearing almost
benign in comparison, in spite of the fact that state repression was responsible for his
initial predicament. In Chapter 4 I will consider in greater detail Boadella’s revisionist
portrait of the dictatorship and its implications. For now I will only state that it is
important that Boadella’s shift of alliances takes place during the Transition, a period in
which the resurgence of sub-state nationalists’ demands, viewed by many as a threat to
Spain’s stability that needed to be curbed, coincided with efforts to forget the recent
dictatorial past. Boadella’s narrative of his incarceration and exile in Memorias also
seems to want to “forget” the dictatorial repression that set the events in motion and
instead center on his Catalanist antagonists, who also happen to be the new adversaries of
the democratic state. I will argue that this alignment with the state doxa reveals the limits
of Boadella’s transgression, which never calls into question the state’s ultimate authority.
Supporting this argument is the final rite of passage that Boadella narrates in
Memorias. In 1999 Boadella was awarded a national prize in the fine arts, the Medalla de
Oro al Mérito en Bellas Artes, by the PP-led Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture.
Boadella’s account of the award ceremony focuses especially on his brief interactions
with King Juan Carlos, who handed out the medals to the recipients. First, Boadella
remembers that as the ceremony commenced he was struck by how absurd the ritual was
that he participating in: “Yo me sentía absolutamente consternado, pensando, ‘¿Qué coño
estás haciendo en medio de este carnaval?’” (423). His thoughts were interrupted when
he noticed the King watching him with an ironic expression, as if the same thought had
occurred to him: “‘¿Qué haces tú en medio de este carnaval?’” (423). Then, Boadella
recounts how just when one of the speakers mentioned that among those honored there
was “‘incluso . . . algún bufón’” (423), the King momentarily abandoned his “refugio
letárgico antipompas” to flash him a smile, “como diciendo: ‘Eso va por ti.’” (423).
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Through these subtle gestures, the King communicates to Boadella that he, too, is above
the silly spectacle of the ceremony. The implied special affinity between the two men
evokes the unique connection of the lowly buffoon with the powerful king. In spite of
their positive rapport, when the time came for Juan Carlos to hand him his medal,
Boadella made a concerted effort to stand as upright as possible during the exchange to
avoid appearing overly deferential. Later, as the King cordially greeted Dolors during the
reception, Boadella, a bit embarrassed, came to realize “el infantilismo” of his previous
behavior. But he justifies his actions thusly: “Pero es que ante un poder como el actual,
dotado de capacidad ilimitada para absorber cualquier contestación, no nos quedan más
que estos ínfimos gestos infantiles para seguir creyendo que somos independientes y que
no agachamos la cerviz. En resumidas cuentas, tampoco hay por qué doblarse del todo ni
ante la indiscutible superioridad” (424). This passage is telling, for here Boadella affirms
the King’s ultimate authority; the irreverent attitude and rebellious behaviors that so
threatened the military’s power or Pujol’s Catalan nationalist hegemony are rendered
trivial buffoonery in the presence of the monarchy’s indisputable supremacy. For this
reason, Boadella’s unabashed criticism stops short of the King. Throughout his account
of the award ceremony, for example, he makes wisecracks about the PP politicians in
attendance (though not without stressing that the PSOE is an even worse alternative); but
Juan Carlos’s eminence never comes under question. Boadella also notes that during his
imprisonment and subsequent exile, by the end of which both Spain’s centralist right and
Catalanist left factions had turned against him, the King stood up for Boadella, asking the
General to go easy on him (295). And later, after Boadella had returned from France as a
persona non grata, the King reached out and invited him to his Saint’s Day celebration
(344). Boadella adds that he was still only provisionally free when that invitation arrived,
and was therefore being excluded from other official events, but the King, “haciendo gala
de su nobilísima educación, era el único que llevaba el paso” (344). He emphasizes Juan
Carlos’s remarkable decorum here, but this fact also highlights the King’s superior
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position over whatever governmental authority happens to governing the country. This is
a reminder that the King is the symbol par excellence of a Spanish nation that transcends
history. It is for this reason that the monarchy continues to be an important component of
the conservative expressions of Spanish nationalism that insist upon the centuries-long
continuity of Spain. Thus, Boadella insists that he is a buffoon who serves only the
highest authority, the one that has existed for centuries. And the buffoon’s critiques of
even the king himself ultimately serve to reinforce rather than call into question the
legitimacy of his authority.
When Boadella is recognized by the ultimate authority, the King, it means his
buffoonery has officially reached the larger Spanish national stage. This scene, therefore,
constitutes Boadella’s final rite of passage leading to his status as “Bufón General del
Reino.” The King’s presentation of the medal to Boadella symbolizes his ultimate
departure from the incestuous, tribal-like cultural space of his past. By being granted this
prize, his artistic achievement has been recognized beyond Catalonia; in other words, the
ceremony is a ritual that consecrates Boadella’s position within state-level cultural
institutions. This final rite of passage in Memorias likewise marks the culmination
Boadella’s coming of age; he has reached full artistic and intellectual manhood. When he
suggests that he decided to accept the Medalla de Oro just to spite Catalan cultural
institutions (“Aceptar un galardón de ámbito nacional era subrayar el menosprecio de la
Cataluña oficial hacia la compañía” (424)), he reminds the reader of the stifling Catalan
cultural environment that he grew out of. By implying that becoming a full-grown man
for him went hand-in-hand with having his achievements recognized by the King,
Boadella asserts the superiority of Spanish cultural institutions.
It is because Boadella does not question the natural legitimacy of Spanish cultural
institutions that even within the same autobiography that concludes with an account of
his acceptance of a prize from the Spanish government, he repeatedly emphasizes how
Els Joglars is a group of “acérrimos individualistas” (181) aimed at being “más
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transgresor” (29), evading “cualquier tentación de buscar el favor del poder” (366), and
reviving the traditional “belicosidad entre comediantes y poder” (397) by reclaiming “la
posición crítica del artista frente al poder” (348). This is a contradiction not only due to
his acceptance of the Medalla de Oro; it is also because Boadella has in fact benefited
from state-level public funding for his work throughout his career. For example, even
though Boadella was rebuffed by the Catalan public television channel TV3 (Televisión
Autonómica Catalana, or as it is renamed in Ubú President, “Telestrés”), Els Joglars did
create and star in six different television series for the Spanish public television channel
TVE (Televisión Española).38 Not only that, but as Feldman informs, two of the plays in
Els Joglars’ satirical Catalan Trilogy, La increíble historia del Dr. Floit & Mr. Pla and
Daaalí “… were produced in conjunction with the publicly-funded Centro Dramático
Nacional (Spain’s national theater) in Madrid, and it did not come as a surprise that José
María Aznar’s central government (known for its centralist views of Spain) would lend
abundant support to Boadella’s parodic critiques of Catalan culture” (Feldman 63). Most
recently, in 2009 Boadella took over direction of the Teatros del Canal, an institution
funded by the Canal de Isabel II, a public entity run by the autonomous community of
Madrid. In spite of his pretensions of transgression, Boadella has benefited from his
friendly relationship with certain centralist powers, much like the early modern buffoons
who enjoyed “extraordinaria cercanía a las personas reales” (Bouza 103) and were well
compensated for their services to the court (104, 115).
Boadella has cultivated his image as a rebellious individualist, though as I pointed
out above, he has been assisted through his portrayals in the media. One example of the
promotion of this image can be found on the blurb on Dios los cría’s back cover, assuring
potentials readers that inside they would find “Ideas rompedoras, iconoclastas, lo más
38 La odisea (1976), Terra d’escudella (1977), F.L.F. (1982, only the pilot aired), Som 2
meravella (1988), Ya semos europeos (1989), Orden especial (1991)
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políticamente incorrectas que imaginar se pueda. Ideas imposibles de clasificar, de
etiquetar, de encajonar. . . . Ideas que rompen moldes, trastocan esquemas, exigen, como
un nuevo aliento, algo que nos saque de este viciado aire que respiramos.” In his
introduction to Dios los cría, editor Javier Ruiz Portella classifies Boadella and Sánchez
Dragó’s way of thinking as “un pensamiento tan a contracorriente, tan resueltamente
impugnador de los principios y valores que marcan nuestro días” (“Introducción” 17). I
have shown throughout this chapter how traditional and conservative many of the
discourses in Memorias are, in particular his androcentric and heteronormative point of
view; his contributions to Dios los cría are no more “rompedoras” than those in
Memorias, though certainly some are “politically incorrect.” Now, it is not my objective
to merely point out the hypocrisy of a famous theater director who performs a public self
that is apparently transgressive, but which is really not. More important is the fact that
Boadella’s performance as buffoon in Memorias works to conceal the power dynamics in
the relationship between Spanish and Catalan cultural institutions.
Cresswell tells us that “The geographical setting of actions plays a central role in
defining our judgment of whether actions are good or bad” (9). This idea is useful in
gaining an understanding of how that which constitutes transgressive behavior in
Catalonia is not so in the national context. If we reframe Boadella’s story to take into
account Catalonia’s place within the larger framework of the Spanish State, it becomes
clear that the excessive institutionalization of culture under the Generalitat against which
Boadella rebels came about in response to the more powerful and naturalized state
institutions and to the history of cultural repression inflicted by the state in that region.
The fact that the post-Transition cultural institutionalization and Catalan language
implementation projects were labeled cultural and linguistic “normalization” is alone
evidence of the transparent nature of those efforts, the goals of which are not yet
“normalized,” or misrecognized, by Catalan citizens. Because it occupies a defensive
position against more powerful centralizing state institutions, Catalan cultural policy is
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especially transparent, making it especially easy target for critics. As Crameri notes about
CiU’s policies, “ . . . the mechanisms by which meanings are fixed are less covert and,
importantly, more open to challenge from those who feel that they are being unjustly
‘moved into contestatory positions’ (Miller and Yúdice qtd. in Crameri 5). Boadella, of
course, is representative of those who challenge CiU’s overt nation-making practices. He
was one of the signers of the Foro Babel, a 1997 manifesto against CiU’s 1983 Linguistic
Normalization Act, which promoted the acquisition and use of Catalan. The Foro Babel
argued that Linguistic Normalization, which required instruction in Catalan in public
schools, for example, infringes upon the individual’s right to speak Spanish. Crameri
rightly points out, though, that the individual’s apparent “freedom” to choose either
language is a fallacy when one of the co-existing languages is dominant over the other
(51). What Foro Babel leaves out of their argument against linguistic policy is the fact
that up until Zapatero’s presidency (2004-2011), the state provided zero support for
Catalan instruction (65). Likewise, Boadella’s complaints about the bias of Catalonia’s
autonomous media fails to consider the lack in state-wide media, based for the most part
in Madrid, of content tailored to the specific needs of different autonomous communities.
As Crameri puts it, “They have therefore collaborated in the production of nationalizing
messages for the state rather than giving a voice to the inherent plurality and diversity of
Spain” (7). The exclusion of a consideration of state-supported institutions’ approach to
language and culture in Foro Babel’s discourse is one more example of the invisibility
enjoyed by those institutions. Because “our consciousness of place all but disappears
when it appears to be working well” (Cresswell 10), “doxa is the most effective way to
maintain the established order” (19). The state’s promotion of Spanish-language cultural
production and of centralizing forms of Spanish identity do not appear arbitrary like the
Generalitat’s policies do, which makes them much more powerful. Boadella’s omission
of the state from his life story renders it invisible, thereby reinforcing its hegemony.
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There arguments are not intended to be a defense of CiU’s cultural policies. In
fact, a number of scholars have recently made persuasive arguments for change in
Catalan cultural institutions. One of them is Crameri, who questions the effectiveness of
the CiU’s model due to its borrowing of tactics used by nation-states (8); she argues that
for a national or regional community without its own state, “it should not be assumed that
[institutional] models derived from city, nation state or European contexts will also work
at these levels” (208). She instead recommends further exploration of innovative forms of
intermediate-level (between city and state) policy-making. Stewart King’s proposal
focuses on language, specifically on the absence of Castilian-language writers in the
Catalan literary system. He argues for a new literary model for Catalonia that is detached
from its nationalist project, for the current model has encouraged the “marginalization or
silencing of those elements which do not conform to the national model” (233).
According to King, by breaking outside the outmoded “national canon” framework and
taking into account the ways in which Castilian- and Catalan-language works engage
with one another, Catalan literature could open itself up to the discovery of innovative
connections characteristic of a future globalized “new Europe.” Teresa Vilarós also
identifies as problematic the singular focus on language in defining Catalan identity. Her
argument is that in order to resist late capitalist commodification, Catalan cultural
identity must open itself up to hybridity, linguistic variety, and “sexual transgressions”
(50). Josep-Antón Fernández further explores this notion of sexual transgression. Back in
1997 Fernández had already perceived a “malestar” in Catalan culture that came about
following twenty years of successful cultural institutionalization beginning with the
1976-1977 Congrés de Cultura Catalana39 and resulting in Catalan-language mass media,
cultural infrastructure, and editorial market (“La cultura està trista”). The malaise that
39 A group of civic initiatives organized for the purpose of promoting Catalan culture and
identity.
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Fernández notices inflicting Catalan intellectuals is a sense doom about the cultural
industry’s future in the face of increasing mercantilization and banalization of Catalan
culture combined with a typically postmodern crisis in the nationalist narratives upon
which the industry was based. For Fernández the concerns about the banalization of
culture are an elitist charge that privileges high culture over other forms, is reactionary
toward popular or mass (especially female-authored) literature, and that fails to recognize
that Catalan culture, in order to survive, must constitute itself as a market. (Ironically,
Boadella agrees with the Catalan cultural elite on this point, maintaining that
normalization has been ineffective in promoting aesthetic innovation and substantive
content over frivolous visual displays, or “espectacularización” (Memorias 399).)
However, Fernández believes that this malestar does point toward the contradiction of
the normalization process. The goal of it was to create a discursively neutral Catalan
identity, but this has resulted in Catalan identity’s transformation into a commodity,
accompanied by a loss of the affective component of national identity. Paradoxically, the
normalization process has at the same time failed to transcend the “national question” as
it had intended. In Fernández’s view, the root of the crisis is Catalonia’s subordinate
position to the Spanish State. Therefore, he suggests as a new strategy of legitimization
for Catalan culture the replacement of the normalization model for one of equality with
the Spanish State. A model based on equality, Fernández explains, would also serve to
open up the now limited definition of catalanidad to consider class, gender, and sexuality
as categories of identity. The third of these categories and its relationship to national
identity is Fernández’s focus in a more recent study, Another country: sexuality and
national identity in Catalan gay fiction, where he establishes connections between the
marginal, peripheral status of the stateless nation and of homosexuality. Here Fernández
theorizes a “queer nationalism” that would “universalize the point of view of minorities,
thus defining the nation as a heterogeneous space whose imagined boundaries are open to
renegotiation” (Another Country 210). Through the inclusion of literatures expressing
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minority identities, the Catalan cultural industry could overcome its “malaise” and its
problematic relationship with state institutions.
While Crameri, King, Vilarós, and Fernández all detect the limitations of and
exclusions inherent in Catalonia’s cultural normalization policies, their suggestions for
remedying these issues separate them from Boadella. On the one hand, Boadella calls for
a return to the past. He frequently expresses his preference for traditional aesthetics,
remarking that no art worth mentioning has been produced by any artist who came after
Velázquez or Beethoven. It is not coincidental that the examples he gives of artists to
emulate are always men; as I have shown, within Boadella’s understanding of gender
roles, women are not active creators. The above-cited scholars, on the other hand,
whether by thinking beyond the frame of the nation-state, pushing for linguistic
inclusiveness, or taking into consideration the artistic expression of marginalized
sexualities, all represent forward-looking ways of envisioning Catalonia and its
relationship with Spain. These examples serve to highlight the extent to which Boadella
the Buffoon’s “transgression” has been domesticated.
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CHAPTER 4: FAILED ETHICS: THE ALIENATING POLITICAL
DISCOURSE OF ADIÓS, CATALUÑA. CRÓNICA DE AMOR Y DE
GUERRA
Only six years after the publication of Memorias de un bufón, in which Albert
Boadella aims to establish himself as a political and artistic “outsider” in Catalonia, the
playwright produced Adiós, Cataluña. Crónica de amor y de guerra (2007), a second
autobiography narrating his ever-increasing estrangement from his fellow Catalans. I
contend that Boadella’s writing of a second autobiography signals his persistent effort to
interact with his enemies in his homeland, even if he means only to provoke them. This is
evidenced by the numerous epistolary exchanges that Boadella reproduces in Adiós,
Cataluña. The public responses that Adiós, Cataluña sparked, such as Isabel-Clara
Simó’s open letter to Boadella called Adéu, Boadella, suggest a successful effort on
Boadella’s part to communicate with his enemies. Yet paradoxically, throughout Adiós,
Cataluña Boadella’s alienation within Catalan society escalates until culminating in his
“muerte civil” (273). To explain this failure to communicate, I will uncover the political
discourses in Boadella’s correspondence with his enemies that serve to “other” them in
opposition to his conception of the ideal citizen, as he conflates a particular traditionalist
and centralist ideology with universal “reality.” I interpret Adiós, Cataluña, even more
than Memorias de un bufón, as an explicitly political action due to its alignment of
Boadella’s life story with the manifesto of the anti-Catalan nationalist political party,
Ciutadans de Catalunya, that he helped to create in 2005. As a part of this process of
mobilizing his life story to advance the objectives of Ciutadans, Boadella rewrites his
own past, downplaying both Francoist oppression in Catalonia and his own participation
in the leftist cultural circles opposing the dictatorship. I will argue that Boadella’s
historical revisionism in Adiós, Cataluña must be viewed within the context of the blind
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spots in officially recognized historical memory entailed in Spain’s Transition to
democracy.
A Response to the Other
If in Memorias de un bufón Boadella aims to establish his independence from
Catalan nationalist and leftist political and artistic sectors through his adoption of the role
of the jester, in Adiós, Cataluña he narrates his subsequent fallings-out with the
remainder of Catalan society. Together the two autobiographies read as a decades-long
tale of progressive isolation and accumulating enmities. As we saw in Chapter 3,
Memorias recounts how Els Joglars’ satirical play La torna triggered the military’s wrath
and how Boadella’s ensuing exile alienated him from the anti-francoist resistance and
Catalanist independent theater movements that he had previously formed part of. Adiós,
Cataluña is dedicated in large part to the decades following that turbulent period, though
in some of the early chapters he also portrays the late Francoist period in noteworthy
ways, which I will discuss later in this chapter. This second autobiography is split
thematically into “Amor” chapters, nearly all of which describe how Boadella’s
relationship with his wife Dolors unfolded, and alternating “Guerra” chapters, which
recount chronologically his conflicts with actors, journalists, politicians, intellectuals, and
other public figures in Catalonia. As I explored Boadella’s depiction of his relationship
with Dolors in Chapter 3, here I will concern myself primarily with the “Guerra”
chapters.
The first three “Guerra” chapters consist of short anecdotes from his anti-francoist
days, followed by two “civil wars” that broke out between Boadella and some of the
more radical leftist Els Joglars actors. Then, “Guerra VI” chronicles his surprise attack on
Jordi Pujol with Els Joglars’ parody of the President of the Generalitat in Operació Ubú
(1981) (in later versions renamed Ubú President (1995) and Ubú President o Los últimos
días de Pompeya (2001)). This chapter appears around the halfway point of the
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autobiography, and it marks the regime change in Catalonia. The dictatorship had ended,
the democratic period was underway, Pujol’s CiU had just begun their lengthy tenure in
control of the Generalitat (1980-2003), and with Operació Ubú Els Joglars were clearly
staking their position against the new leadership and making more enemies within
Catalanist sectors. The battle told in “Guerra VII” is against the far right, which
responded aggressively (with bomb threats, even) to Els Joglars’ production of Teledeum
(1983), which mocked the Catholic Church. (The conservatives’ natural enemies, whom
Boadella had already alienated, by his account did little to defend him.) There are also
“Guerra” chapters dedicated to the dismay he felt when both the Catalan People’s Party
(PPC) and the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) proved they would not unequivocally oppose
the nationalist agenda.40 This loss of confidence in the national parties led him to
participate in the founding of a new self-proclaimed “non-nationalist” Catalan party
called Ciutadans de Catalunya, which gave rise to further battles. There is a sequel to his
war with the La torna actors, six of whom sued Boadella in 2005 for co-authorship rights
to the work (Boadella won). And Adiós, Cataluña also delivers a few jabs to animal
rights activists who pushed for the law passed by the Catalan Parlament in 2011
prohibiting bullfighting in the region.41
40 In the 1996 Pacto del Majestic the CiU agreed to support Aznar’s presidential bid in
exchange for PPC’s support of CiU in the Catalan Parlament. In 2003 PSC formed an alliance
with the independence-seeking Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and the Iniciative per
Catalunya Verds-Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (ICV-EUiA) coalition, called the Tripartit Catalán,
the success of which led to Pascual Maragall’s replacing Jordi Pujol as president of the
Generalitat.
41 The prohibition went into effect at the beginning of 2012, making Catalonia the
second autonomous community to ban bullfighting; the Canary Islands did so in 1991. It may not
be permanent, though. Opponents of the prohibition have created a petition requesting the
classification of the bullfight as a Bien de Interés Cultural, which would give the central
government justification to protect it and revoke the autonomous communities’ authority to ban
it. As Boadella recognizes, the ban has as much to do with Catalonia’s efforts to distinguish itself
from Spain as it does with a concern for animal rights. That the corrida is referred to as the Fiesta
Nacional, setting it apart from the traditions that are specific to local fiestas and often also
involve bulls, is evidence alone of its significance as a unifying symbol of a singular Spanish
identity.
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Throughout the course of this long series of battles with a wide array of enemies,
the Catalan press unfailingly acted as a thorn in Boadella’s side ever since they turned
against him during his post-prison break exile in France. As proof of their unrelenting
attacks, Adiós, Cataluña begins with a compilation of twenty-three quotes reviling
Boadella’s character excerpted from fifteen different newspapers (nearly all of them
based in Catalonia). Cited, for example, is this statement by Remigi Casa published in El
Periódico de Catalunya: “Si tuviera que escoger entre salvar la vida de un animal o de un
ser humano, empezaría por el segundo. Únicamente tendría dudas en alterar el orden
prioritario si el ser humano fuera Boadella” (13). Another comes from Joan de Sagarra in
El País: “Arcadi Espada no debe tener el oído muy fino. Yo no grité: ‘Boadella, hijo de
puta.’ Lo que grité fue: ‘Boadella fill de puta’” (14). Immediately following this chorus
of insults are the first words of the autobiography’s prologue, in which Boadella
addresses his intended reader: “Estimado lector” (17). The irony of this seemingly
courteous apostrophe is made apparent by the insults hurled his way on the preceding
four pages. These quotes represent the antagonistic “Cataluña” to which Boadella bids
farewell in his book’s title, and the entire text that follows serves as his response to their
provocations. This irresistible urge to reply to his enemies’ is further exemplified in
Adiós, Cataluña when he reproduces letter exchanges between him and various
adversaries. In each of these epistolary exchanges an enemy’s voice intervenes in the
narrative and calls for a response from him, and he finds himself unable to resist
participating in the dialogue.
In one example, Boadella reproduces a letter sent to him by the city council of
Bellpuig, a community in Urgell region of Catalonia, requesting his attendance at the
Estel i Boira awards ceremony, at which the council annually presents an Estel (star)
award to a Catalan citizen who they deem has acted in defense of Catalan identity, while
reserving the Boira (fog) award for a citizen who has had an especially negative affect.
Needless to say, the council intended to bestow Boadella with a Boira. Following the
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Bellpuig city council’s letter is a reproduction of the caustic letter Boadella sent them in
response, in which he condemned the division of citizens into categories and closed with
the following curse: “ . . . como despedida, quiero decirle sin hostilidades ni ironía, pero
con serenidad y también con una íntima satisfacción: váyase concretamente a la mierda,
usted, sus premios y la Catalunya que nos pretende imponer” (213). In the letter’s
postscript he requested that his letter to be read aloud at the ceremony, which
unsurprisingly caused a flurry of reactions in the press.
The ways in which Adiós, Cataluña functions as a response to his estranged
compatriots can be illuminated by Angel Loureiro’s theory of the autobiographical genre
in The Ethics of Autubiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain. According to
Loureiro, apostrophe and prosopopeia are inherent characteristics of autobiography that
set it apart from other literary genres. He explains: “In a way all autobiographies are
confessions in that they render accounts to an other that, although invisible,
unacknowledged, or even negated, leaves its unquestionable imprint in any
autobiography.” He adds that “No other genre’s thematic and strategies are so dependent
on, and determined by, its addressees” (Loureiro xiii). This dependence on the addressee
reveals how autobiography is unique in that while it is guided and limited by discourses,
it simultaneously functions within a realm that precedes the discursive: the ethical. By
ethical, Loureiro refers not to the conventional understanding of the term, but rather
ethical in the sense defined by Levinas. For Levinas, the self is not an autonomous, selfpositing entity, but instead comes about through interaction with the Other. “Ethics,”
then, describes this unavoidable responsibility that every subject has to the Other. The
social relationship with the Other deposes the subject from a central position, thereby
allowing the subject to escape the absolute emptiness of impersonal being. Without this
interaction with the Other, the Self remains incomplete. In the case of autobiography,
explains Loureiro, the Other is the reader who has either explicitly or implicitly called for
an explanation from the autobiographer, who then feels compelled to respond by means
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of the autobiographical text (Loureiro xii). Prosopopeia, then, functions as the voice of
alterity, while apostrophe represents the self’s response. The examples of prosopopeia in
Adiós, Cataluña - the insults that open the work and the letters that provoke Boadella’s
caustic replies - indicate that the Others addressed in Adiós, Cataluña are Boadella’s
political and professional antagonists. Adiós, Cataluña represents Boadella’s unavoidable
responsibility to respond to the call of the other, a responsibility that allows him to escape
solitude and incompleteness. Yet if this is the case, then it seems incongruent that
Boadella’s relationships with the Others that call to him in the text are so inharmonious,
and that his title implies a desire to cut off communication with those Others.
Levinas is forced to explain just this incongruence, as history has not often
demonstrated the idealistically peaceful relationships of alterity that he describes. His
explanation is that as soon as more than the self and the Other are present, conflict
ensues. When the self it confronted with more than one Other, it has the freedom to not
respond, to not uphold its responsibility for the Other. Levinas points in particular to
justice (the act of making judgments upon the Other), as the origin of the violence
associated with the existence of a multiplicity of others:
You have spoken of the passion of hate. I feared a much graver
objection: How is it that one can punish and repress? How is it that
there is justice? I answer that it is the fact of the multiplicity of
men and the presence of someone else next to the Other, which
condition the laws and establish justice. If I am alone with the
Other, I owe him everything; but there is someone else. Do I know
my neighbor is in relation to someone else? Do I know if someone
else has an understanding with him or his victim? Who is my
neighbor? It is consequently necessary to weigh, to think, to judge,
in comparing the incomparable. The interpersonal relation I
establish with the Other, I must also establish with other men; there
is thus a necessity to moderate this privilege of the Other; from
whence comes justice. Justice, exercised through institutions,
which are inevitable, must always be held in check by the initial
interpersonal relation. (Levinas 89-90)
In the case of Adiós, Cataluña, Boadella addresses not a single Other, but an everexpanding variety of enemies who have provoked him to respond. Following Levinas,
this existence of a multiplicity of Others exposes relationships to the realm of justice,
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politics, and discourse, opening up possibilities for antagonism and violence and closing
off the possibilities for peaceful, constructive alterity (Levinas, Ethics 89-90). This
accounts for the dissonance that dominates the text.
According to Loureiro, the justice exercised through institutions that Levinas
describes in the above citation designates entrance into the realm of the political, or in the
autobiographical text, the realm of discourse. In other words, when the Others are
multiplied, the duality of the relationship between self and Other is replaced by the
totalizing, conforming power of political discourse. For this reason, Loureiro’s
understanding of autobiography combines Levinas’s emphasis on the ethical with a
consideration of the discursive, for “the subject is neither purely political nor purely
ethical” (Levinas 14). For him, the ethical and the political interact in self-writing, neither
superseding the other. He explains that its ethical element orients autobiography toward
the future, because beyond merely attempting to reconstruct the past, the autobiographer
seeks interaction with the world, and is therefore conscious of the reader who called for,
and will read the text. The political, on the other hand, is past-driven, as the
autobiographer seeks to understand and recreate his past, which is possible only through
constrictive communal discourses. In the next section I will identify the discourses that
impede Boadella from maintaining a non-judgmental relationship with his Others.
The Other and the Citizen
I contend that at the root of the communication barrier that compels Boadella to
repeatedly and fruitlessly attempt to explain himself to his enemies are divisive political
discourses, in particular, discourses that delegitimize his opponents’ voices by othering,
as opposed to engaging with, them. I will show how his depiction of those with whom he
communicates as mentally unsound, irrational, or brainwashed renders the dialogue
ineffective. One example of Boadella’s correspondence with an Other in Adiós, Cataluña
begins with a letter that he received from Lluís Oliva, the director of the Catalan public
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television station TV3, requesting his participation in La Marató de TV3, a telethon
aimed at raising funds for muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis research. Boadella
composes a letter to decline the invitation, explaining to Oliva that the station had
unfairly excluded Els Joglars’ work from their programming for ideological reasons.
What follows is a fragment of Oliva’s reprimanding response to Boadella’s rejection:
“…probablemente el error es mío al haber pensado que usted era capaz de dejar de lado
cualquier cuestión de cariz personal y profesional delante de una ocasión de interés
superior” (202). But Boadella gets the last word as he quotes his final sardonic response
to Oliva, in which he suggests that they dedicate their next telethon to curing one of “las
numerosas enfermedades también progresivas y hereditarias, pero de origen psíquico, que
TV3 viene provocando a través de una version sectaria de este país, tele-dirigida desde la
Generalitat” (202). By Boadella’s account, this final insult brings to a halt the
correspondence between Boadella and Oliva.
TV3 is not the only transmitter of Catalan nationalist psychiatric disorders in
Boadella’s view; the reluctance of the entirety of the Catalan press to objectively criticize
CiU corruption scandals, for example, constitutes a “falta de anticuerpos frente a la
epidemia” (172). Throughout Adiós, Cataluña, Boadella refers to Catalan nationalist
sentiment as a “virus inoculado,” “patalogía,” or an “epidemia colectiva” (153, 52, 149).
In fact, one of multiple possible connotations of the word “Crónica” in the
autobiography’s title hints at the “chronic” ailment that Catalonia suffers at the hands of
nationalists. In one passage Boadella recalls that he and his wife Dolors were relieved
when they arrived to a small rural community in which some of the dwellers shared their
political positions: “Nos invade un placer indescriptible al constatar que Sodoma alberga
todavía a un puñado de ciudadanos no contaminados” (279). With these descriptions of
catalanismo, Boadella not only implies that his political views are healthy and sound, but
he also assumes the authority to diagnose others, like a clear-minded psychiatrist
analyzing his unhinged patients. In Memorias de un bufón, for example, he assigns his
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theater the function of treating “neurosis públicas” (20). In Adiós Cataluña he describes
his reflections on contemporary Catalonia as “mis descripciones científicas de la
epidemia” (261). Acting out this role of scientific observer even more explicitly (and
playfully), Boadella once donned a white lab coat to give a public speech: “me presenté
ante el auditorio con una bata blanca de médico a fin de dejar claro que mi labor tenía
solo un componente terapéutico en la lucha contra el virus nacionalista” (262). This
unequal relationship that Boadella establishes between himself and those with whom he
disagrees effectively disqualifies the latter from legitimate intellectual debate.
It is for this reason that when some of his former friends and colleagues began to
distance themselves from him, instead of wondering if they had valid reasons for doing
so, he assumed they had fallen victim to “una epidemia de dimensiones insospechadas y
que afectaba ya a colaboradores, vecinos, amigos y parientes” (183). Likewise, when one
of Els Joglars’ productions - En un lugar de Manhatten (2005) - flopped in Catalonia,
Boadella concluded that the nationalist “epidemia” had finally infected nearly every
Catalan (273). By discounting rather than trying to understand his compatriots’ opinions,
he further isolates himself from them. This isolating effect is evident in Boadella’s
prescription to avoid contracting the Catalanist syndrome: “Y es que el contacto con esta
modalidad de epidemia tribal, que se introduce en todos los recodos del pensamiento,
comporta mucho riesgo de contagio. Es una auténtica guerra bacteriológica que va
eliminando paulatinamente la totalidad de los anticuerpos, de forma que lo más prudente
en estos casos es poner tierra por medio, tanta como para que la acción del virus no tenga
alcance” (261). To “poner tierra por medio” is to distance himself from his Others, which
points toward the antithesis of the ethical relationship imaged by Levinas.
Boadella’s position as outside observer to the madness wreaking havoc in
Catalonia also permits him access to reality. In another example of failed communication
Boadella received an invitation to an artistic workshop organized by the Sociedad
General de Autores y Editores called the Encuentro de Creadores. Boadella answers not
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only to decline the invitation, but also to ridicule the organization’s use of the word
“creator,” which he complains is overused to the point of being applied to even the most
amateur artists: “¿De veras hay cien mil creadores? Entonces, resulta obvio que nos
hallamos frente a una hecatombe sin precedentes. Solo cabe imaginarse la que montó el
primero y auténtico Creador para deducir lo que puede suceder ahora con tal cantidad de
vocaciones divinas entre nosotros” (216). Boadella justifies this mocking response by
suggesting that it was his obligation to “poner un toque de realismo a la petulante ficción
. . .” (216). Throughout Adiós, Cataluña Boadella repeatedly conflates his worldview
with reality and his opponents’ with fiction, lamenting, for example, that “ . . . mi tribu
se ha convertido en un colectivo con gran inclinación a perder el sentido de la realidad . .
. ” (149). On the one hand, he criticizes those members of the press who oppose his
political stance for practicing “fictitious journalism” and for “dedicándose de manera
sistemática a la desfiguración de la realidad como su mejor estrategia comercial” (257,
117). On the other hand, those who share his point of view enjoy the privilege of seeing
reality. He congratulates his wife Dolors for being “una obsesa de verdad” and for “esa
pasión suya por la realidad” (131). And when he compares the current Els Joglars theater
troupe members to the problematic ones in the past that included actors involved in leftist
activism, he commends the present one because “no pierden nunca el sentido de la
realidad” (95).
Boadella argues that the only possible way to secure allegiance to a purely
fictional Catalan nation is through coercion and manipulation. Accordingly, he portrays
the Generalitat as a totalitarian force that suppresses individual liberties, and its citizens
(excluding himself and Dolors, of course) as a brainwashed mass. For example, he
blames the negative reviews that Els Joglars received for Bye, Bye Beethoven in 1987 on
the public’s faithful following of Pujol’s orders: “En el país se había instalado una
suprema obediencia” (149). Decades later, when his involvement in Ciutadans de
Catalunya led to further shrinking of his circle of friends, he says they too were following
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implicit orders: “Lo asombroso es que, sin haber dado nadie la orden explícita, todos
parecían obedecer a un poder oculto de dimensión planetaria que, mediante
procedimientos paranormales, habría filtrado la siniestra consigna” (260). This invisible
force impeding free thinking even seizes foreigners living in Catalonia, a phenomenon
Boadella calls the “síndrome del converso” (in reference to the Jews who were compelled
to convert to Christianity under the Inquisition) who zealously exhibits his allegiance to
the dominant beliefs in order to compensate for his questionable background (206). This
is how he describes English-born writer Matthew Tree in a letter he sent in response to
his comments on Boadella’s problematic relationship with Catalonia in CAT: un anglès
viatja per Catalunya per veure si existeix (2000). Boadella denies Tree the authority to
opine on the issue of Catalan nationalism through various strategies. One is to accuse him
of dimwittedness (“un mentecato de su talla” (207)) and youthful naïveté (“Mire, joven,
todos hemos cometido muchos actos de ignorancia hasta bien superada la adolescencia”
(205)). Another is to emphasize Tree’s outsider status by calling him “guiri,” “el mister,”
and “marciano” (207).42 As he disqualifies him as a participant in the debate, Boadella
others and closes off communication with him. There is no better demonstration of this
than the fact that when Boadella subsequently received a letter from Tree - presumably to
engage in dialogue with Boadella about the issues raised in his letter - he returned it to
Tree without even opening it: “No faltaba más que perder el tiempo en polémicas con el
pillo británico” (208).
Boadella suspects that this herd mentality that he finds so reproachable is a
consequence of progressives’ attempts to compensate for their individual mediocrity:
“Gente poco preparada en general, que acostumbra ver enemigos en todo lo que no está
fuera de sus excelsas letanías de libertad, paz, solidaridad y bla, bla, bla. Por ello fuerzan
42 Tree is hardly a mere foreign tourist, as Boadella would have it. According to his
website, Tree has lived in Barcelona since 1984 and published works in Catalan since 1990
(http://www.matthewtree.cat/index.php?seccio=biografia&idioma=).
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siempre la cohesión entre mediocres, con el fin de conseguir por la mayoría lo que no
pueden realizar individualmente” (93-4). The progressives are not the only problem in
Boadella’s mind, though, as he bemoans to his sympathetic wife: “Entre los cuadrúpedos
de la derecha y los impostores de la izquierda . . . ¡estamos rodeados!” (135). He portrays
himself and Dolors as standing alone, under attack by the ignorant masses to which they
refuse to conform. He highlights this notion with Adiós, Cataluña’s epigraph, an extract
from Fray Luis de León’s “Oda XXIII (A la salida de la cárcel)”:
Aquí la envidia y mentira
me tuvieron encerrado.
Dichoso el humilde estado
del sabio que se retira
de aqueste mundo malvado . . . (Epigraph)
In this poem, the famous sixteenth-century humanist theologian, whose refusal to
conform to the strict rules established at the Council of Trent led to his trial and
imprisonment under the Inquisition, announces his departure from a cruel, suffocatingly
closed-minded society. Boadella establishes a parallel between the circumstances under
which Fray Luis de León composed his ode and his own perceived persecution within the
Catalonia to which he likewise bids farewell. With this epigraph, then, Boadella not only
compares himself to the “sabio” Fray Luis de León, but he also associates Catalonia’s
Generalitat with the Inquisition. Not surprisingly, Boadella also likens contemporary
Catalanist politics to German National-Socialism, referring to Pujol as the “Reichführer
de la Generalitat” (105) and comparing the erosion of friendly relations with neighbors,
colleagues, and distant family members to the almost undetectably gradual infiltration of
Nazism into German society: “. . . Lo que iba aconteciendo en mi propio entorno me
recordaba lo que algunos escritores alemanes cuentan de la lenta y sinuosa implantación
del nazismo en su país” (260). According to Boadella, through the repressive institutions
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of the Generalitat, the proponents of Catalan nationalism punish any freethinker who
attempts to stray from the flock.
The Ciutadans de Catalunya political party was conceived of in 2004 during an
informal gathering of several self-proclaimed persecuted nonconformists as an alternative
to the existing autonomous-level parties which in their view had conformed to the
nationalist agenda implemented by CiU. The group felt especially compelled to launch
the party after the PSC, led by Pasqual Maragall, won control of the Generalitat in a
coalition with ERC (the “Tripartit Catalán”). In 2005 Ciutadans presented its first
manifesto, composed by a group of well-known outspoken critics of Catalan nationalism,
including Boadella.43 The party campaigned for the first time in the 2006 autonomous
elections and won three seats in the Catalan Parliament. In 2007 Ciutadans published
Ciudadanos: Sed realistas: decid lo indecible, which included an account of the party’s
creation, two manifestos, and selected contributions from the founding members.
Ciutadans presents itself as a center-left non-nationalist party, and some of the specific
goals of its platform include ending the linguistic normalization policies in Catalonia,
terminating the process of creating a new Catalan Statute of Autonomy (nevertheless
approved by the Catalan Parliament in 2006), and halting the devolution of powers from
the State to the autonomous communities (especially the asymmetrical structure that has
favored more devolution to the historic nationalities than to the other autonomous
communities). The Ciutadans de Catalunya’s shorthand for their platform is the
“restauración del ámbito normal de la política” (Ciudadanos 89), a curious appropriation
43 The fifteen founding members of Ciutadans de Catalunya and authors of its Primer
Manifiesto include, along with Boadella, Félix de Azúa, Francesc de Carreras, Arcadi Espada,
María Teresa Giménez Barbat, Ana Nuño, Félix Ovejero, Féliz Pérez Romera, Xavier Pericay,
Ponç Puigdevall, José Vicente Rodríguez Mora, Ferran Toutain, Carlos Trías, Iván Tubau, and
Horacio Vázquez Rial.
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of CiU’s “normalization” discourse, which shows that they are staking their position in a
battle to define what constitutes a “normal” political environment in Catalonia.44
The language employed throughout Ciudadanos to describe its positions in
opposition to prevailing political views is identical to Boadella’s in his treatment of his
enemies in Adiós, Cataluña. The First Manifesto distinguishes between what they call the
prejudices, obsessions, and sentimentalist myth-making of the Catalan political
establishment, and their proposed rationalist “defensa de la verdad” (137). They uphold
the rights of the individual over collective demands (90). And they assert their alignment
with secularism and scientific progress while categorizing Catalan nationalism as a
reactionary form of religious indoctrination (92). In short, Ciutadans de Catalunya seeks
to redefine Catalan politics according to “tradición ilustrada: la idea de comunidad
política cimentada en la ley y la justicia y no en la tradición, el mito, y la identidad
cultural” (89). As its name indicates, the overarching goal of Ciutadans is to mold
Catalonia into a body of rational, responsible citizens (according to their definition of
citizenry) instead of what is in their view a brainwashed mass. As Boadella puts it in
Adiós, Cataluña, Ciutadans aimed to “convertir un rebaño45 de sumisos contribuyentes
en ciudadanos” (249) who are equally conscious of their responsibilities as of their rights
(246). They define their ideal citizen against the traits that they believe characterize most
44 Not included in Adiós, Cataluña is Boadella’s later involvement in the recently created
state-level party Unión, Progreso y Democracia (UPyD), which shares with Ciutadans de
Catalunya a re-centralizing agenda. The party’s manifesto, published in 2008 with the title
Política razonable (Ed. José Lázaro. Madrid: Triacastela, 2008), includes contributions from
Rosa Díez, José Lázaro, Fernando Savater, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Martínez Gorriarán,
plus the transcription of a speech Boadella gave in September 2007 at an event celebrating the
party’s inauguration.
45 Boadella extends this metaphor of the lazy herd in contrast to responsible citizenry in
La controversia del toro y el toreo (Ed. Milagros Sánchez Arnosi. Madrid: Cátedra, 2011), which
consists of an extended debate between a defender and opponent of the tradition. The character
opposed to bullfighting, who identifies too closely with the bull and even ends up confusing
himself with the animal, expresses the comfort that the herd offers: “¿No has sentido nunca el
placer del rebaño moviéndote sin la angustia de la responsabilidad individual?” (123).
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Catalans, hence their frequent use of negative language in Ciudadanos (they explain
which policies and ideologies that they oppose more than they propose original policies).
In Adiós, Cataluña Boadella employs this same strategy of contrasting his compatriots
with his (and Ciutadans’s) ideal. Together, all of the Others that populate Boadella’s
autobiography constitute the antithesis of a citizen. This is made especially clear by
Boadella’s use of terms like “talibanes” (207), “tribu” (35), “aborigen” (274), and
“bárbaros” (169) in reference to his Catalanist or leftist peers. These labels imply that
they constitute an uncivilized, undemocratic, and pre-modern community that is out of
place in twenty-first-century Europe, or in other words, that they are non-citizens.
It is no coincidence that Ciutadans’s and Adiós, Cataluña’s discourses around
legitimate citizenship align; Boadella wrote his second autobiography soon after
Ciutadans had come onto the Catalan political scene and he had begun personally taking
heat for it from supporters of the political establishment. Because of Boadella’s fame and
his fondness of theatrics, he became the party’s de facto spokesperson and the target of
attacks from its opponents, especially socialists, who had briefly enjoyed his lukewarm
(as he portrays it) support before the creation of the 2003 Tripartit. Ciutadans de
Catalunya could be viewed as the political materialization of Boadella’s aesthetic and
intellectual project. At the same time, I would contend that with Adiós, Cataluña
Boadella employs his own life story in the service of Ciutadans’s political ideology.
Terry Eagleton, reflecting on the dual nature of ideology, explains that while it is deeply
personal in that it is constitutive of our very identities, it simultaneously presents itself as
impersonal, universal truth: “In the sphere of ideology, concrete particular and universal
truth glide ceaselessly in and out of each other, by-passing the mediation of rational
analysis” (Ideology 20). This observation is useful in understanding the way that
Boadella filters his own particular life experiences through the worldview adopted by
Ciutadans de Catalunya, presenting it as universal reality. In this way, he mobilizes his
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own personal experiences in Adiós, Cataluña in the service of naturalizing a particular
political ideology.
Further evidence of the key role that Boadella’s personal biography plays in the
legitimization of the ideology adhered to by Ciudadans is the fact that Boadella’s two
individual contributions to the Ciudadanos collection are autobiographical in nature.
They function as personal manifestos that are analogous to the official party manifestos.
In fact, the first one is called “Manifiesto de un traidor a la patria.” In it he narrates his
decision to give up the privileges granted to him as a member of the nationalist “tribe”
and to become a detested outsider, ironically attributing the reversal to his inability to
tolerate the condescending smile that nationalists discreetly exchanged with one another:
“¿Cómo pude ser tan insensato de autoexcluirme del festín? ¡Y todo por una puñetera
sonrisa étnica!” (“Manifiesto de un traidor” 60). The second is the transcription of a
speech called “Traición a una nación inventada” and that Boadella gave in 2006 when he
was presented with a prize from the Madrid-based daily newspaper El Mundo. Here he
recounts how during his incarceration for La torna his situation was appropriated by the
nationalist cause without his permission, effectively stripping him of his agency. When
he recuperated that agency by emphatically rejecting nationalist politics, he says his
perception of the Catalonia he once adored had been permanently altered: “Las rocas de
Montserrat se transforman en decorado de cartón piedra…” (176). The experience opened
his eyes to the reality that surrounded him; he had finally gained the clarity of vision to
perceive the artificial nature of the Catalan nation, beginning with one of its most sacred
locations, the Montserrat mountain.46 But it also meant he would never be able to return
46 Montserrat, located in Catalonia’s Barcelona province and home to a monastery of the
same name, is a symbolically important landscape for Catalan nationalism. According to
Montserrat Guibernau’s history of Catalan nationalism, it was at a gathering of Catalan nationalist
Catholics at the Monastery of Montserrat in 1947 that Catalan was spoken publicly for the first
time since the end of the Civil War (42).
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to the happy ignorance of his past. Thus he expresses his gratitude for the prize for he
says it helps to mitigate his feelings of “nostalgia por no vivir en la fantasia” (176). The
various versions of Boadella’s story of his “betrayal” and the difficulties it entailed for
him parallel the challenges he foresees for Ciutadans as it makes an effort to break away
from the status quo.
Keeping in mind Xosé Manuel Núñez-Sexias’s already cited study of the
proliferation of discourses of Spanish nationalism in the democratic period, I would argue
that what Ciutadans and Boadella present as reality in fact has many traits that correspond
with Núñez’s conceptualization of Spanish nationalism. Boadella’s efforts to undermine
the legitimacy of Catalan nationalism as a political project by depicting it as irrational,
totalitarian, or backwards align with the discourses that Núñez identifies in his analysis.
And Ciutadans’s emphasis on returning to the State authority over areas presently
controlled by autonomous governments is evidence of its centralist bias. What Boadella
and Ciutadans present as self-evident reality is in fact one particular vision of Catalonia’s
ideal relationship to Spain that is guided by pre-established centralist Spanish nationalist
discourses.
It is this filtering of Boadella’s arguments through simplistic discourse that IsabelClara Simó takes issue with in her reading of Adiós, Cataluña. The Valencian writer, who
identifies herself as one of Boadella’s publicly declared enemies (“. . . vostè ha
pronunciat el meu nom en públic com si es tractés d’un enemic’” (Simó 18)), published
an open letter in direct response to Boadella’s farewell to Catalonia called Adeu,
Boadella: Crònica d’una decepció. As its title indicates, Simó’s letter, disputing point by
point Boadella’s criticisms of Catalan society, posits that his fellow Catalans who
stopped attending Els Joglars’ shows were not obeying implicit orders from the
Generalitat nor were they suffering from a mysterious nationalist virus; they were simply
disappointed with how Boadella’s work evolved after his impressively irreverent earlier
plays (including Ubú President, which she reminds him drew enormous crowds of
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Catalans delighted to laugh at themselves) (10). But maybe even more than with his
recent works, Simó is disappointed with his narrative’s conformity to “l’esquema
preestablert en el gresol de l’espanyolisme” (31) in its treatment of Catalan nationalism,
when Boadella should know that the situation is far more complex than such a viewpoint
recognizes. She suggests that his lumping of progressives into the same pile as his
nationalist enemies is one example of his strict alignment with a conservative Spanish
nationalist discourse that vilifies those two groups (37).
The Spanish nationalist discourses that restrict Boadella’s understanding of
Catalonia’s lukewarm reception of Els Joglars’ more recent work are also what cut him
off from the Others who populate his writing, some of whom reach out to him not to
provoke, but to establish genuine communication with him. Boadella tells in Adiós,
Cataluña how when the Calafell city council, having years earlier banned Els Joglars
from performing in the town, contacted the group to let them know their personae non
gratae status had been rescinded, he responded with a cleverly composed rejection of
their peace offering (203-4). And when the PSC-led Generalitat wanted to present
Boadella with the Creu de Sant Jordi prize in recognition of his cultural and civic
contributions to Catalonia, presumably conveying their shift away from the CiU-led
Generalitat’s approach toward artists like Els Joglars who were critical of their nationbuilding policies, Boadella again rejected the offer (234-35).
Yet if Boadella truly seeks to cut himself off from his Catalan Others, why does
he continue responding to their calls to him? Why does he repeatedly explain himself to
them, with not one, but two autobiographies, plus a slew of public speeches narrating his
political conversion? Not only that, following the publication of Adiós, Cataluña,
Boadella has not in fact said goodbye altogether to the Catalan public scene. In Dios los
cría and in his latest collection of diary entries Diarios de un francotirador,47 Boadella
47 Diarios de un francotirador: Mis desayunos con ella. Barcelona: Espasa, 2012. Each
entry of this diary begins with the conversation he shares with his wife Dolors over breakfast and
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rehashes his same disputes with his Catalan enemies. In my view, these repeated efforts
are indicative of a desire to respond to the Other, but they are thwarted by the tired
discourses that inhibit meaningful dialogue.
A consideration of some aspects of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative
action may be helpful here. Like Levinas, Habermas is interested in intersubjectivity, or
on the subject’s relationship with and responsibility toward the Other, though while
Levinas’s work is concerned with a pre-political relationship between the self and the
Other, Habermas’s study of communicative competence forms the basis of a discourse
ethics that he prescribes as a model of democratic political procedure.48 According to
Habermas, political procedures based on his theory discourse ethics would foment “. . .
programs and goals that are the result of more or less fair compromises” (Habermas 194)
reached through critical discussion among participants who are equally dedicated to
arriving at an agreement. This type of inherently consensual social action is what
Habermas calls communicative action. One of the requisites of communicative action is
that each participant recognize that the Other’s arguments are reasonable. Following
Habermas, one can already begin to identify the limitations to Boadella’s approach to his
political disagreements, the first being his delegitimization of his opponents’ participation
in the dialogue by diagnosing them as sick, irrational, or brainwashed. Statements such as
“se empeñan en seguir la senda de la fe y no la del pensamiento libre. Es más fácil el
credo que la ciencia” (Adiós 267), in which Boadella aligns his own views with scientific
analysis and his opponents’ with uncritical faith, establish an uneven debate between
his subsequent reflections on the topics they discussed. Some of the entries had already appeared
on his blog on the Els Joglars website: http://www.elsjoglars.com.
48 For a study of the ways that Levinas’s and Habermas’s seemingly contradictory
theories converge, see Steven Hendley’s From Communicative Action to the Face of the Other
(2000), which argues that certain elements of Levinas’s work can resolve contradictions that
Hendley observes in Habermas’s theory of discourse ethics.
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Boadella and those with whom he disagrees that shuts down the communication before it
even begins.
Another determinant of communicative action is the attitude adopted by the
participants going into the discussion. Habermas explains that “. . . social actions can be
distinguished according to whether the participants adopt either a success-oriented
attitude or one oriented to reaching understanding” (Habermas 161). A success-oriented
attitude results in strategic, as opposed to communicative action, the former characterized
by a participants’ “causally exerting an influence upon others,” and the latter by the
participants’ “coming to an understanding with them” (161). Boadella’s correspondence
with his opponents resembles strategic discourse in that it seems more oriented toward
achieving the political objectives laid out in Ciutadans de Catalunya’s manifesto than
toward finding common ground with his Others. In fact, there is plenty of evidence in
Boadella’s language that betrays a strategic-oriented attitude, one being the war metaphor
he employs throughout Adiós, Cataluña. Boadella describes public criticisms of him and
Els Joglars as military strikes and their responses as counterattacks: “Nuestro plan de
combate pasaba por no dejar un solo ataque sin réplica” (Adiós 178). Within this allegory,
every letter, prank phone call, and speech he directs toward his antagonists functions as
ammunition: “Cada uno de los ataques que sufríamos era replicado automáticamente por
una descarga en forma de cartucho literario. Decenas y decenas de cartas constituyeron
un armamento ligero disparado con mira telescópica directamente al autor de la agresión”
(199). The goal in these exchanges, then, is to win a battle against a dehumanized enemy,
rather than to establish a meaningful discussion with fellow citizens. When Simó makes
the following proposition to Boadella: “què li sembla si vostè s’adscriu al moviment, la
ideologia, la religió o la bandera que li doni la gana, i jo faig el mateix amb les que em
donin la gana, i parlem pacíficament, sense insultar-nos?” (28), she suggests they engage
in the type of cooperative debate between participants with divergent points of view that
characterizes Habermas’s model of communicative action. But instead of striving for
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understanding, be it through an ethical relationship with or a commicative attitude toward
an Other, Adiós, Cataluña works toward fulfilling certain objectives implicated in the
centralist Spanish nationalist ideology to which Boadella and Ciutadans de Catalunya
adhere. In the section that follows I will explore one of the ways that Adiós, Cataluña
performs this function.
Rewriting History
In the analysis that follows, I will identify to what end Boadella others the
Catalanists and leftists who receive the brunt of his insults in Adiós, Cataluña. Keeping in
mind Loureiro’s observation that while the ethical is future-looking, the discursive looks
backward, I will answer this question by analyzing the discourses that guide Boadella’s
recreation of his past. It is my view that in order to delegitimize sub-state nationalist or
leftist movements that threaten the hegemony of the centralized State, Boadella revises
his own past and by extension rewrites twentieth-century Spanish history. The first way
in which Boadella seemingly attempts to rewrite his past in Adiós, Cataluña is by
downplaying, if not completely denying, the role he played in the cultural resistance to
the Francoist Regime in the 1960s and 70s. Els Joglars’ daring performance of La torna,
because of Boadella’s and the actors’ ensuing imprisonment and the protests it sparked, is
emblematic of the Catalan cultural resistance of the late period of the dictatorship. For
this reason it is significant that in Adiós, Cataluña, as he recounts the legal battle he was
brought into decades later by former Joglars seeking authorship rights to La torna, he
says it is the play that he is least proud of: “Proclamaban ser coautores de un espectáculo
que, por desgracia, era el que menos me gustaba de los que me había inventado a lo largo
de mi vida. Con toda franqueza, me hubiera complacido no ser yo el autor . . .” (Adiós
264). If it is not because of the hardship it led to that he regrets writing La torna, then
why would he seek to distance himself from it, especially after it brought Els Joglars
international fame? I submit that it is to dissociate himself from his former leftist activism
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that La torna is documentation of. Proof of this can be found in his treatment of that
period of his life in Memorias de un bufón, where he suggests that during all those years
he was only pretending to be one of the “progres” who surrounded him; he was “un
infiltrado, un conservador” who went undetected “bajo un camuflaje perfecto de formas y
vestuario personal” (Memorias 152). He explains that it was simply professionally
beneficial for him to affiliate himself with those groups that he secretly despised.
Boadella not only downplays his own enthusiasm for and influential role in the
anti-dictatorial cultural resistance, but he also trivializes the movement itself. In one
passage of Adiós, Cataluña he doubts that the work of Els Joglars had any effect on the
political situation, claiming that even at that moment, “ya me parecía dudoso que con
semejante catálogo de melifluas veleidades consiguiéramos sembrar ‘inquietud popular’
y ganarle al enemigo la pretendida guerra de liberación” (Adiós 30). The word
“pretendida” casts doubt on the entire resistance movement, not just on its cultural arm,
as does his labeling of it as “una causa fingida” (30) or “la simulación antifranquista
catalana moviéndose en el contexto del supuesto combate cultural contra la dictadura”
(30). According to Boadella, not only was his own activism pretended, but the whole of
the participants were also - some knowingly, others unwittingly - faking it. For Boadella,
a true war involves far more risk and hardship than the late dictatorship doled out: “…en
el fondo cualquier guerra seria arrastra hambre, opresión tiránica o un ataque despiadado
a la propiedad. No era el caso del crepúsculo franquista. Vivíamos ya demasiado felices”
(46). He remembers that era as one filled with “euforia, libertad y frenesí” (46). Because
the resistance to the dictatorship was merely simulated, Boadella explains, it was a
healthy experience for young people who could act out rebelliously in a relatively safe
environment: “Hay que reconocer objetivamente que la vileza de un régimen exhausto
nos proporcionaba a los jóvenes el incentivo de rebeldía imprescindible en esta etapa de
vida. El ansia por conseguir pasar algún día de perdedores a ganadores constituía un
estímulo hacia la subversión, aunque, por supuesto, siempre simulada” (46). He goes as
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far as to say that the dictatorship was “una bendición para una juventud que necesitaba
enfrentarse al malo de la película y vivir así bajo una dosis de generoso riesgo” (47). That
he considered the risk of repression not too high (“El riesgo estaba bajo control . . .” (46))
seems incongruous with his own experience, considering that he was jailed even after
Franco had already died.
This is not the only example of Boadella’s rose-tinted view of the late dictatorship
in Boadella’s work. In Dios los cría, as he grumbles about the abundance of superfluous
(in his opinion) laws that have cropped up during the recent decades of the democratic
period, he compares it to the “freer” regime that preceded it: “Nadie puede negar que
durante la dictadura, si dejamos de lado la cuestión política, en plano individual, éramos
mucho más libres,” whereas nowadays “eres carne de multa, expediente y acojono” (Dios
60). Another example is the first and only feature film that Boadella wrote and directed,
Franco y yo, ¡Buen viaje excelencia! (2003), in which he chooses to represent a decrepit,
senile Franco on his deathbed, the phase in his life when he was least powerful. In her
analysis of the film, Sarah Wright points out that while it does include scenes of torture
and executions meant to showcase his cruelty and depravity, at the same time “the
portrayal of [Franco] as an infantilised old man, given to bouts of crying, with an insipid,
comical voice and incontinence create familiarity. He could be anyone’s ailing granddad”
(Wright 316). She also interprets the film’s final image of Franco’s coffin, with the letters
of the name rearranged to spell the word “fin,” as “a denouement, a closure. … This final
conceit suggests not just the end of the film, but of Francoism itself” (322). This notion
that the effects of Francoist died along with the dictator also emerges in Boadella’s
description in Adiós, Cataluña of Madrid in the 1980s:
Madrid se transformaba para mí en la libertad; en aquel
hormiguero las identidades eran una minucia, incluida la española,
que desde la caída del franquismo no levantaba cabeza. Cualquier
caballero que exhibiera la bandera nacional pegada detrás del
coche pasaba por facha, no solo allí, sino en todo el territorio. No
había ni siquiera letra en el himno de España. Todavía hoy los
equipos deportivos españoles, cuando juegan competiciones
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internacionales, tienen que poner cara de besugo durante la
interpretación del himno porque no pueden ni mover los labios
como hacen sus adversarios de otras naciones. Que nadie me hable
de nacionalismo español, porque no existe; lo practican solo
algunas momias nostálgicas. En España el único nacionalismo
existente es el periférico. (149-50)
By identifying the (in his words) few remaining Spanish nationalists as “fachas” and
“momias nostálgicas,” he emphasizes that they are mere remnants of the dictatorial past,
just like Spanish nationalism itself. Thus, what Boadella implied at the end of Franco y
yo, ¡Buen viaje excelencia! here he states explicitly: that the death of Franco brought on
the end of Spanish national identity altogether, a notion which, as I have pointed out in
this and previous chapters, has been disproved by scholars like Núñez and Brad Epps
who uncover how Spanish nationalism has merely taken new shapes in the democratic
period, some turning out more centralistic and others more open to a plurinational
framework.
When he focuses especially on the supposed relative freedoms provided by the
regime and on the final days of an enfeebled Franco, Boadella obscures the repression
inflicted by the regime and its lasting effects. In “Becoming Normal: Cultural Production
and Cultural Policy in Catalonia,” Josep Antón Fernández lists the specific Francoist
policies of the post-war period that inhibited Catalan cultural production for decades and
resulted in “the practical disappearance of the cultural infrastructure that had been created
over a century” in Catalonia (342). These policies included the banning of Catalan from
public use and from schools, as well as the censoring or exiling of Catalan intellectuals.
Even after the ban on books and plays in Catalan was lifted in 1946, heavy censorship
continued. Now, it is true that the repression was harshest in the early period of the
dictatorship, before the shift away from autarky and toward openness and modernization
beginning in the late 1950s, and that Boadella concerns himself primarily with the later
period, as that was when he began his professional and political activity. However, the
effects of the cultural repression lasted throughout the entirety of the dictatorship and into
the democratic period. As Fernández notes, “it was not until 1976 that the number of
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books published in Catalan per year reached the same figures as in 1936 (around 800
titles), and that the first newspaper in Catalan since the end of the war, Avui, appeared”
(343). Yet even then, due to the systematic repression of the Catalan language most of
Catalan-speaking population was “illiterate in its own language” (343). The repression
was not only cultural, but ideological as well. As Kathryn Crameri describes it, the
regime implemented “systematic distortions of history” (133) which included the youth
of Spain’s peripheral cultures being “subjected to a historical education that had robbed
them of any contact with their own community’s past and subjected them to tales of the
glory of the Spanish nation” (133). In addition to the historical brainwashing that took
place in schools, even “physical traces of the past had also been erased by changing the
names of streets and buildings, removing statues and monuments, and destroying or
restricting access to books and archives” (133). Both Fernández and Crameri
acknowledge, in spite of their critiques of CiU’s normalization policies and their presentday effectiveness, that they constituted an effort to recuperate what had been lost and to
institutionalize a Catalan language, culture, and identity that had for decades subsisted
through only unofficial channels. Boadella’s almost sunny depiction of the late dictatorial
period is problematic in its disregard for the systematic linguistic and cultural repression
and historical reeducation carried out under Franco. This denial has the effect of
depriving the Catalanist movement of its raison d'être, namely the revitalization of a
formerly suppressed Catalan culture and identity.
If Boadella downplays the magnitude of Franco’s past repression and its
relevance today, then it follows that he would be hostile to efforts to investigate its legacy
in the present. He demonstrates this when he dismisses proposals to exhume the mass
graves of victims of the Civil War and Francoist regime and inquiries into past human
rights abuses: “Todo el interés sobre los posos nefastos que la dictadura irradió en los
españoles se concentra ahora en abrir fosas y condenar un régimen ya fallecido.
Naturalmente, lo más fácil” (Adiós 196-7). Instead of these areas, Boadella proposes
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focusing on a different legacy of the authoritarian regime that he sees as a more relevant
concern: tackiness. After having characterizing Francoism not as a truly fascist regime,
but as merely “el encumbramiento de una cursilada” (47), he explains how the bad taste
inculcated under Franco endures: “La falta de atención a lo público, la ociosidad frente al
desorden, la dejadez ante la mugre y el desprecio a lo vegetal se han convertido en los
rasgos característicos del paisaje urbano. Esta lacra endémica en la conducta de la gente
es algo que todavía pervive del franquismo. Quizá lo único, pero nadie parece concederle
mayor importancia” (196). Thus, for Boadella the worst, and maybe the only, remnant of
the dictatorship worth confronting is the general bad taste and poor craftmanship of
contemporary Spaniards. (He reiterates this point in Dios los cría: “La peor herencia que
subsiste del franquismo es lo mal que se trabaja” (Dios 94).) Placing this comparatively
superficial matter above a concern for the unidentified bodies and institutionally
“forgotten” trauma that continue to haunt present-day Spanish politics constitutes yet
another erasure in Boadella’s account of history.
This trivialization of the consequences of the dictatorship is especially apparent in
his repeated comparisons of the democratically elected Generalitat to the authoritarian
regime. In one example, he likens the sensation he feels when he travels outside of
Catalonia to the freedom that Spaniards who lived under Franco would feel whenever
they enjoyed a brief getaway to France (Adiós 188). In Dios los cría, he posits that
Catalanist activists were lastingly contaminated by the regime’s tactics - the same regime
they fought against. He calls this phenomenon the “milagrosa mutación del franquismo al
catalanismo” (286), which also makes Pujol into “un producto puro del franquismo…”
(286). From this point of view, sub-state nationalisms, not the Spanish right, are the
present-day offshoots of the dictatorship. And in some aspects, says Boadella, they are
even worse than Francoism. He identifies the Catalan media’s submissiveness to the
Generalitat as more dangerous than Francoist propoganda and censorship: “Este inocuo
vasallaje es de los capítulos más vergonzosos que ha vivido el periodismo de este país. Ni
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el vil acatamiento de la prensa durante el franquismo tiene parangón con esta
servidumbre corrupta y de consecuencias tan nefastas para la ciudadanía” (Adiós 172).
Leftists are also implicated in Boadella’s account. In an impressive rhetorical maneuver,
he attempts to distort history to the point of characterizing Franco’s heritage as leftist, at
least half seriously insisting that Franco was more leftist than Zapatero (115). He makes
this case by pointing out the dictator’s protectionist policies and his passing of a law
implementing social security, concluding that “¡Un rojo del carajo resultó ese Caudillo!”
(116). This argument, by placing Franco in the present-day left’s ideological camp,
eschews the PP’s ideological inheritance. He does this even more blatantly when he faults
the Spanish right for trying too hard to not appear reactionary due to a “complejo”
instilled in them by “el fantasma del franquismo que les han endilgado los progres …”
(Dios 119), implying that Francoism’s legacy in the PP is merely a progressive invention
that was interiorized by the right.
I understand these examples as forming part of an effort on Boadella’s part to
shift his readers’ focus away from the damage done by decades of totalitarian and
authoritarian rule (which, he contends, was not so bad anyway) and toward a new set of
enemies. These new enemies are the Others who not only function as antagonists in his
life personal life, but who simultaneously pose a threat to the current democratic State.
Boadella seems to assert that the leftist and Catalanist activism that began in opposition
to Franco in the 1960s and 70s was at that time unnecessary and futile, and in the present
day not only superfluous, but pernicious. This fabrication of new Others in the telling of
his past coincides with the transformation of Spanish nationalist discourse during the
Transition, which, in the name of wiping out its upsetting and divisive recent past,
replaced it with a new set of enemies against which to define the democratic Spain that
was in construction: leftists and sub-state nationalists. Salvador Cardús i Ros argues for a
critical analysis of this element of the narrative of the Transition. He points out what he
calls the “…impure character of the Spanish democratic foundations” (19), which in his
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view did not entail a proper break from the previous regime. As Cardús i Ros identifies it,
the reason behind the lingering of Francoism during the changeover of power was the fact
that Francoists took part in shaping the Transition. He explains that also helping this
process along was that “having developed for nearly forty years under a dictatorship, the
larger part of Spanish society had internalised a political culture that trivialized the
authoritarian character of Franco’s regime” (20). This “nonchalance” toward
compromising and negotiating with the regime, reinforced by the international
community’s relations with it, diminished the possibility of breaking unequivocally from
it (20). Thus, the “politically laudable intention of turning the page from an authoritarian
to a democratic regime without bringing about a political breakdown” resulted in a
“situation in which the dictatorship’s juridico-political framework became the source of
legitimacy for the new democratic model” (19). As I have shown, Boadella’s
autobiography contributes to this trivialization of the regime in its insistence upon the
benefits he and other young people were accorded by having a relatively benevolent
political enemy they could “pretend” to confront, as well as in its ignoring of Francoist
cultural repression in Catalonia.
Cardús i Ros also reflects on the ways in which memories are revised and
recreated according to present-day or future concerns: “…memory is not so much the
interpretation of the past as a justification of the present in terms of certain expectations
about the future” (23). In the Spanish case, this phenomenon took the form of a historical
revision of certain aspects of the dictatorial period for the sake of securing democracy.
However, the strategic erasure of one enemy of democracy necessitated the creation of a
new one. As Cardús i Ros explains, an important component of historical memory is that
it is “constructed in dialectical terms, invoking or even creating a conflict without which
there would be no history . . . ” (23). If it was unviable to construct the democratic State’s
historical narrative in opposition to Francoists with the resurfacing of same divisions that
led to the Civil War, then it became necessary to “invent new enemies of democracy”
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(25). These “supposedly true adversaries of democracy” would become “the ‘radicals’”
(25). Cardús i Ros continues: “By demanding a break with the past, this sector
endangered the negotiations between those in power and the legitimating opposition”
(25). Boadella likewise leaves no room for the questioning of the legitimacy of the State
based on its rootedness in the authoritarian regime from which it did not entirely break
(in its compromises with Francoists and intentional forgetting of their past crimes). This
questioning is so unacceptable to Boadella that he equates it with the irrational ramblings
of lunatics or the brainwashing propoganda of a power-hungry totalitarian Generalitat. It
is no coincidence that the groups that Cardús i Ros points to for their questioning or
outright rejecting the process in which the current democratic State was formed are the
same ones that Boadella also delegitimizes Adiós, Cataluña by depicting them as not just
undemocratic, but as even more repressive than Franco was. And it is likewise significant
that Boadella’s pivotal moment of discovery of his new antagonists during the La torna
controversy, as he recounts it in Memorias, occurred simultaneously with the democratic
Transition. Indeed, Boadella’s life story fluidly aligns with the official narrative of the
Transition through which, by Cardús i Ros’s account, the villains of the previous three
decades are forgotten (if not forgiven) and replaced.
Like Cardús i Ros, Joan Ramon Resina is also concerned with the “vilification” of
these new “enemies” of democracy, in particular sub-state nationalists, who he says have
been made into “alien[s]” or “pariahs of the new regime” for questioning the scope of the
State’s sovereignty (“Introduction” 9). He attributes this to the power of the hegemonic
State to name its Others as part of its strategy to quell the competing historical narratives
emerging from Spain’s peripheries. He points specifically to derogation as a form of
naming that excludes and silences the Others who are not called up as witnesses with
regard to the truth or falsity of that which is attributed to them” (“Short of Memory”
111). When a label is imposed upon them, they lose the power to define themselves. We
see this strategy at work in Boadella’s autobiography. At one point, he succinctly defines
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his quintessential enemy: “Un colega-Dios vanguardista, bisexual, pacifista, algo
agnóstico y republicano de izquierdas” (Adiós 19). Later he does it again, this time
adding a few more characteristics:
Están contra Israel y por Palestina, por Castro y contra Estados
Unidos, por Picasso y contra Dalí, por la teología de la liberación y
contra la Iglesia, por la negociación con asesinos, a favor de la
multiculturalidad, por las vanguardias, por los derechos de los
animales, contra la energía nuclear y por los molinos generadores;
deprecian la idea de un Dios intangible y adoran la medicina
alternativa. Su más perspicaz conclusión es que en España la culpa
de todo la tiene el PP. (267)
Boadella places his opponents into a category that denies them complexity and agency,
adding that they do not think for themselves, but rather “circulan con el piloto automático
conectado” (267). His derogatory naming of them therefore excludes them from speaking
for themselves; in this way, he effectively dehumanizes, or others, them.
As a part of this process, Boadella also contrasts them and the beliefs that he
attributes to them with his definition of the ideal citizen and the universal values
associated with it. As Resina observes, “Categorical derogation depends on the capacity
of hegemonic discourse to create subsystems of marked elements while organizing itself
around nonmarked positions: bourgeois universalism, male neutrality, statal patriotism”
(111). With this in mind, we can interpret Boadella’s labeling of his enemies as his
“marking” of them as other to supposed universal hegemonic narrative of the State, the
result being the suppression of the alternative historical narratives they possess. Resina
argues that it is the historian’s responsibility to counteract this process of demeaning and
silencing the “particularist discourse” - as opposed to the State’s “universalist” discourse
- by recognizing the systematically delegitimized memories of what he calls the
“heteronationalities.” He cites Edith Wyschogrod’s notion of the heterological historian
in An Ethics of Remembering (1998), which, drawing on Levinas’s understanding of
ethics as the self’s responsibility to the Other, aims to give a voice to the voiceless of
history through this inescapable ethical responsibility (108). For the heterological
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historian, this would entail a focus on the particular memories, and a simultaneous
resistance to the homogenizing abstraction of the hegemonic perspective, for, as Resina
notices, the conflict between between universalist and particularist historical memories is
“an ethical question passed off as an epistemological one” (118). By adopting
universalizing political discourse, as he transforms his autobiography into a a virtual
manifesto of the Ciutadans de Catalunya party, Boadella’s account of history loses sight
of its ethical responsibility to the Other.
The last period in Boadella’s life that Adiós Cataluña recounts is his participation
in Ciutadans de Catalunya. This moment also corresponds with his reaching the greatest
degree of isolation in his home community. He observes that after his first public
statements on behalf of Ciutadans, which, as I have argued, contained a great deal of
othering, derogatory language directed at the party’s political opponents, his telephone
stopped ringing: “Pues bien, inmediatamente después de la irrupción de Ciutadans, el
descenso de comunicaciones . . . fue impresionante” (Adiós 260). Adiós, Cataluña was
awarded with the Espasa prize in 2007. To celebrate, Boadella gave a reading from the
autobiography in a boat off the coast of Barcelona in a refusal to accept the prize on
Catalan territory. The image of Boadella floating in the Mediterranean detached from his
community of origin is suggestive of the alienating consequences of the polarizing
discourses that uphold centralist ideology and inhibit communication and understanding
between him and his political Others. Rather than a locus of openness and exchange, in
Boadella’s performance the sea becomes the place where dialogue has finally drowned,
and where he can only hear his own voice.
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PART III: JULIO MEDEM’S LA PELOTA VASCA: AN ALTERNATIVE
TO SPANISH NATIONALIST DISCOURSE
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CHAPTER 5: RISING ABOVE DANGEROUS TERRITORY: THE
RECONFIGURATION OF BASQUE NATIONALIST SYMBOLISM IN
LA PELOTA VASCA: LA PIEL CONTRA LA PIEDRA
The subversive does not necessarily proclaim itself as such from the start.
On the contrary, in order to act more surely on the beings and things it defies, it
often sides with them unreservedly, to the point of speaking in their name.
‘In this way white can topple white into a fatal abyss of whiteness
by claiming to be whiteness itself,’ he said.
Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion
Before San Sebastián native Julio Medem released his first documentary film La
pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra in 2003, the prominent filmmaker was highly
regarded by critics and audiences in Spain and abroad for his unique cinematic vision. In
contrast to the positive reception of his fictional films, La pelota vasca came under a
great deal of criticism due to its direct treatment of the highly contentious topic of Basque
nationalism and its relationship with the Spanish State. This chapter will explore the
elements of the film that its critics interpreted as reflections of Medem’s bias toward
Basque nationalism, including its unconventional structure and the predominance of
symbols and imagery associated with a Basque nationalist aesthetic. Through an
examination of Medem’s interrogation of traditional gender constructs, an aspect of La
pelota vasca that has yet to be explored, I will unpack the film’s reinterpretation of
Basque nationalist symbolism. In this way, I intend to reveal, through a feminist lens, that
La pelota vasca offers alternative ways of perceiving nationalist symbols, historical
narratives, and social structures, and that it transgresses and exposes the roots of the
polarized aggression that characterizes the Basque-Spanish conflict.
La pelota vasca: Controversy and Criticism
Before making La pelota vasca, Medem had already been internationally
acclaimed for fiction films such as Vacas (1992), La ardilla roja (1993), Tierra (1996),
Los amantes del círculo polar (1998), and Lucía y el sexo (2001). Medem’s work has
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enjoyed a substantial amount of criticism that illuminates its formal and thematic
elements. In addition to countless articles, a number of recent auteur studies on Medem
from Spain and abroad, including Jo Evans’s Julio Medem (Critical Guides to Spanish
and Latin American Texts and Films (2007), Rob Stone’s Julio Medem (Spanish and
Latin American Film) (2007), Zigor Etxebeste Gómez’s Julio Medem (2012), and Jesús
Angulo and José Luis Rebordinos’s Contra la certeza: El cine de Julio Medem (2005),
have described in detail Medem’s unique visual discourse. Critics have taken note
especially of the coherence of Medem’s aesthetic and themes throughout his oeuvre,
stemming from his constant search for a personal cinematic language (Evans 21). This
language is characterized by “labyrinthine narratives” (21), frequent ellipses - Medem
cites the iconic Spanish (and fellow Basque) filmmaker Víctor Erice (b. 1940) for
inspiring this aspect of his films’ structure (19) - , the mixing of fantastic and realist
elements, and the presentation of multiple points of view. Many critics have also pointed
out the overarching themes that appear in Medem’s work, including duality, escape, the
fragility of identity, and an interest in the unconscious (Medem studied to be a
psychiatrist at the Universidad de Soria and the Universidad del País Vasco before
deciding to dedicate himself to film).
Medem’s unique vision brought him great success with critics and audiences
alike; however, his venture into the documentary genre and a highly contentious political
topic with La pelota vasca in 2003 provoked quite a different public response. During the
seven years before he commenced production on La pelota vasca, Medem had been
living in Madrid (Etxebeste Gómez 34), and he had not directly dealt with the topic of
Basque nationalism since Vacas, the 1992 film that launched his career. However, the
changes occurring in the Basque Country’s political environment in the early 2000s
motivated him to dedicate himself fully to exploring the conflict between Spanish and
Basque nationalisms (an issue that a number of critics, including Rob Stone, insist was
always present in his films even when not dealt with explicitly (Julio Medem 200)). In
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Spain’s 2001 general election, the conservative People’s Party (PP) aligned itself with the
center-left Spanish Social Worker’s Party (PSOE) in the Basque Country, in an
unsuccessful attempt to defeat the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). Because the PP and
PSOE have in recent decades taken different approaches to terrorism and the Basque
nationalist issue in general, the former favoring a hardline strategy and the latter more
open to dialogue, this move led to increased polarization of Basque politics, in which
voters’ options were effectively limited to two. It was precisely this polarization of
nuanced viewpoints that drove Medem to make La pelota vasca. In a piece entitled “La
memoria (Un pájaro vuela dentro de una garganta. Trayecto),” published in El País soon
before the documentary’s release, Medem explained that he intended La pelota vasca to
be a personal exercise in respectfully listening to a wide spectrum of opinions on an
emotionally charged conflict, or in his words, “ver el odio sin odiarlo” (“La memoria”).
To do so, Medem interviewed over 100 politicians, philosophers, religious leaders,
journalists, artists, historians, sociologists, representatives of political and social
organizations, and victims of terrorism. Seventy interviewees appear in the final cut.49
Even though Medem, in an effort to create an unbiased and inclusive examination
of the topic, invited participation from figures representing the broad spectrum of
perspectives on the issue - from current etarras to PP leaders - and refused to seek
funding from either the Basque or Spanish governments (Pablo 381), La pelota vasca was
highly controversial from the start, due to a great degree, if not entirely, to the
aforementioned polarized political context surrounding the film’s production and release.
In The Basque Nation On-Screen: Cinema, Nationalism, and Political Violence Santiago
de Pablo describes in detail the multitude of factors that even before the 2001 PP-PSOE
coalition had contributed to the polarization in Spain and the Basque Country that was so
49 Medem later released a 7-hour extended version, as well as a book in 2004 including
transcriptions of nearly all of the interviews in their entirety.
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evident in the exaggerated public response to La pelota vasca, including the rise in
“constitutionalist” (anti-Basque nationalist) support among Basques and the increased
visibility of terrorist victims’ organizations like Foro Ermua, ¡Basta Ya!, and the
Asociación de Víctimas de Terrorismo (AVT), the third of which was especially vocal in
its denunciation of the film (382-385).
The controversy surrounding La pelota vasca, which is outlined in a report by
Igor Barrenetxea Marañón, began during its filming, when a number of key figures,
including current etarras, the PP, and key anti-Basque nationalists theorists Fernando
Savater and Jon Juaristi, declined Medem’s invitation to participate in the documentary.
The polemics continued when the PP tried to prevent its premier (without having even
viewed it) at the San Sebastian Film Festival in September 2003 (Barrenetxea Marañón
143). Then, after viewing the final cut, two disenchanted interviewees - Gotzone Mora
and Iñaki Ezkerra, both active in Foro Ermua - unsuccessfully demanded to have their
contributions removed from the film (140). A number of other interviewees, though they
did not demand to be cut from the film, expressed their disappointment with the final
results. Historian Antonio Elorza, for example, publicly announced that he felt he had
been somewhat deceived by Medem (“Ikimilikiliklik”). Medem’s aforementioned article
in El País (“Un pájaro vuela”) was a response to the early criticisms, in which he insisted
upon the sincerity of his effort to present the topic in an objective, fair manner. In spite of
this, the controversy was reignited in 2004 when La pelota vasca was nominated for a
Goya for Best Spanish Documentary and a group, led by the AVT, protested the
nomination outside the ceremony. Fellow filmmakers expressed their solidarity with
Medem during the ceremony in the name of artistic freedom. In response to the protests,
Medem published an open letter to the AVT in El Mundo, entitled “S.O.S,” again
defending his intentions and denying the AVT’s accusations of the films’ indifference to
terrorist victims.
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As this brief summary of the ordeal makes clear, most of the negative feedback
that La pelota vasca received centered around the bias toward Basque nationalism that
critics perceived in it. Pablo, for one, while defending Medem against what he considers
excessive backlash, aligns the film with democratic, non-violent forms of Basque
nationalism: “In objective terms, La pelota vasca: La piel contra la piedra defends a
moderate Basque nationalist point of view akin to that of the EAJ-PNV, EA, and Aralar
(a nonviolent splinter group of HB)” (387). Others, as Barrenetxea Marañón reports,
suggested that the film specifically promoted the Plan Ibarretxe, then PNV-affiliated
lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe’s 2002 proposal for the Basque Country’s gradual
secession from Spanish State, and which was undoubtedly another contributor to the
intensity of the socio-political environment surrounding the documentary (151). Still
others, including film scholar Paul Julian Smith, have viewed La pelota vasca as a
justification for terrorist violence.
In The Moderns, published in 2000 (before Medem made La pelota vasca), Smith
evaluates Vacas, La ardilla roja, and Tierra, praising in particular the way that he sees
the films problematizing “the historically violent relationship between identity, land, and
language” (3). Smith even deems these films “an artistic endeavour analogous to that of
the brave theorists of recent Basque post-nationalism’” (3), referring to Savater, Juaristi,
Juan Aranzadi, and Patxo Unzueta, whose work he commends in the book. (These men, it
may be assumed, did not interpret Medem’s work as analogous to their own, as none of
them agreed to appear in La pelota vasca.) However, after having celebrated Medem for
“demythologizing” Basque identity in his early fictional works (3), in his review of La
pelota vasca Smith included him among “those who offer apologies for [ETA] violence”
(“La pelota vasca”). Smith’s reasoning behind his accusation will come to light in the
next section of this chapter.
Unlike Pablo or Smith, several of those who published negative responses to La
pelota vasca in the Spanish press did not even watch it, and instead based their, often
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ideologically determined, commentary entirely on the media coverage of the film.
According to Barrenetxea Marañón, both Joseba Arregi and then Minister of Culture
Pilar del Castillo publicly criticized the documentary without having seen it (142-143).
And in an especially ironic example, film critic Fabián Rodríguez openly admitted in El
País that he had not and would not watch it, before he proceeded to attack it in several
paragraphs: “No he visto la película. Tampoco deseo verla. No la veré” (“La pedrada
sobre la piel (irritada)”). Obviously, not watching the film prevents one from performing
a nuanced evaluation of it. In spite of this factor, which is beyond Medem’s control,
Barrenetxea Marañón deems the film a failure in its goal of fomenting an open,
transformative dialogue, for it only managed to spark yet another outbreak of the same
polarized political debate, only this time mediated through film.
Yet it is precisely the fact that the debate is mediated through film that Barrentxea
and many of La pelota vasca’s harshest opponents do not adequately address. The large
extent to which the film has been simplistically evaluated in Spain as either “good” or
“bad” (more often “bad”), depending on how closely it is perceived to align with the
critic’s position on the Basque-Spanish conflict, is evidence of a lack of attention paid to
how La pelota vasca’s formal elements relate to the themes and concerns that appear in
Medem’s celebrated fictional works. The criticisms of La pelota vasca that do take into
account its formal elements tend to center on two areas. The first regards Medem’s
somewhat unusual editing, in particular the film’s fragmented structure, unannounced
juxtapositions of documentary and fictional footage, and the way it presents the victims’
interviews. The second characteristic of La pelota vasca that critics’ frequently find fault
with is its showcasing of symbols and imagery associated with rural Basque culture. It is
argued that the former confuses and manipulates the viewer by decontextualizing
interviewees’ arguments, revealing Medem’s bias toward Basque nationalism. And the
latter is often interpreted as a sentimentalist defense of the Basque nationalist worldview.
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It is my contention that Medem’s editing and his employment of symbols of
Basque identity do not equate a simple bias toward Basque nationalists. In the next
section I will focus on the observations regarding the film’s structure, outlining how
some scholars have already challenged the simplistic interpretations that accuse Medem
of political manipulation and bias by illuminating La pelota vasca’s thematic and formal
connections to Medem’s other films.
Fragmentation, Subjectivity, and Symmetry: La pelota
vasca and Medem’s Fictional Oeuvre
The unconventional way that Medem edited La pelota vasca is one of the most
frequent targets of the film’s detractors. In this section I will outline three of the most
discussed aspects of Medem’s editing of the documentary, summarizing the reasons
many viewers and commenters took issue with them and interpreted them as a bias
toward Basque nationalism. Then, I will show how taking into account the recurring
techniques, themes, and concerns that appear in Medem’s work before and after La
pelota vasca, it is possible to interpret the documentary’s formal elements in an
alternative way.
One of the most controversial aspects of La pelota vasca is its fragmented
structure. The film is unevenly divided into approximately 40 short sections, each
highlighting a different aspect of the Basque-Spanish conflict, such as the abolition of the
Basque fueros, the issue of whether or not Navarra should be considered a part of the
Basque Country, the Civil War and the Francoist regime, the Spanish State’s prisoner
dispersion policy for imprisoned etarras, and the Ibarretxe Plan. Breaking up this general
structure are the approximately nine lengthier segments during which victims (or family
members of victims) of either ETA terrorism or state-sponsored repression share their
personal stories. The transition between each section is announced with shots of men
playing pelota, the traditional Basque sport that provides the film’s title and connective
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motif. The sound of the pelota game continues in the background as each section’s
usually 2 to 5 interviewees’ faces briefly appear along with captions identifying them. In
this metaphor, then, the pelota game represents the debate and its players the interviewees
who participate in it. Each section is constructed as a miniature debate about one
particular issue within the larger nationalist conflict, or as individual “matches” between
pelotaris with differing opinions, perspectives, and experiences. Yet these debates are
simulated, for each participant was interviewed individually without having heard what
any of the other interviewees had to say. Also, the audience is mostly denied an
overarching narrative: there is no voiceover narration; we never hear the questions that
Medem asks during the interviews; and we are exposed only to extremely short fragments
of each participant’s argument about a particular topic, rapidly juxtaposed with several
fragments of other participants’ contrasting opinions. The brief shots of pelota players
slamming a ball against a stone wall in between each unit of interview fragments compels
the viewer to imagine herself rapidly bouncing from one fragment to another in an
unpredictable sequence, just as the ball does between competing players and the wall.
Barrentxea Marañón quotes two journalists’ complaints about what he calls the
film’s “efecto atomizador” (162). They argue that the interruptions and decontextualized
presentation of the interviews makes La pelota vasca disorienting for viewers who are
not already familiar with the political situation it deals with, and that it also negates the
contributions made by interviewees’ whose views differ from Medem’s (146). Stone
agrees that “the lack of context for this structural experimentation is disorienting” (Julio
Medem 196), and Pablo likewise notes that the rapid exchanges and lack of voiceover
means that foreign film critics, or anyone who is not deeply embedded in the conflict, can
easily get lost (Pablo 386).
Antonio Gómez L-Quiñones reflects more at length on the flaws in Medem’s
editing of La pelota vasca. For him, Medem’s attempt to construct a dialogue among a
variety of individuals representing diverse points of view results in a mere confrontation
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between those irreconcilable positions due to a lack of communicative norms that
establish the definition of the problem and the terms of the debate, and upon which all of
the participants’ would have to agree. Although there is no voiceover narration, Gómez
L-Quiñones does recognize that with the few maps and captions providing historical
context and (in some cases, refutable) facts in La pelota vasca, Medem does attempt to
strike a balance between relativism and the imposition of an arbitrarily selected model
through which to define and approach the issues. However, in Gómez L-Quiñones’s
view, Medem’s limited metalanguage represents a failed communicative model precisely
because so many of the participants in the debate disagree with the terms Medem
establishes: “¿dónde radica la utilidad de definir, por ejemplo, Euskal Herria con mapas y
rótulos sobreimpresos cuando el nudo gordiano del asunto es precisamente que
importantes interlocutores no aceptan esa definición?” (153). Yet in spite of his critique
of La pelota vasca’s ability to establish a transformative dialogue through which an
understanding could be reached, Gómez L-Quiñones disagrees with those who accuse
Medem of obliquely justifying Basque nationalism, for Medem’s own metanarrative is
contested within the film by some of the participants’ comments (154).
Anyone who is familiar with the rest of Medem’s oeuvre should not be surprised
by Medem’s rejection of a linear structure for La pelota vasca. As Etxebeste Gómez
notes, Medem’s affinity for ellipses and nonlinear chronology lead him in many of his
films to “efectuar saltos en el tiempo narrativo de forma continua y a veces difícil de
asimilar” (51). He cites as an example Lucía y el sexo’s complex meta-narrative structure
in which the characters’ actions are determined by and determine the novel that the
Lorenzo character is writing, and in which the fantastical hollow, floating island to which
Lucía escapes is filled with holes through which characters can fall and reemerge in a
different point in the story (76). As Etxebeste Gómez sees it, this rejection of linear
chronology is a result of Medem’s prioritizing of images over narrative: “El mundo de
Medem es, por lo tanto, más visual y emocional que narrativo” (48). In fact, many critics,
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including Evans, view Medem’s work as akin more to poetry than to narrative (21).
Medem’s experimentation with nonlinear narratives transcends the boundaries of the
individual film. The actors Emma Suárez, Carmelo Gómez, Txema Blasco, and Karra
Elejalde populate all three of Medem’s first three films: Vacas, La ardilla roja, and
Tierra. The child actor Ané Sánchez also appears in these three films, and her characters
are always linked to Suárez’s; in Vacas she plays the child version of Suárez’s character,
in La ardilla roja her character’s behaviors often mirror Suárez’s characters’s behaviors,
and in Tierra she plays Ángela, the daughter of Suárez’s character, who is also called
Ángela. Nacho Novo appears in La ardilla roja, Tierra, and Los amantes del círculo
polar, and Najwa Nimri stars in both Los amantes del círculo polar and Lucía y el sexo.
In both La ardilla roja and Los amantes del círculo polar there is a German character
named Otto. La ardilla roja, Tierra, and Lucía y el sexo all feature a central female
character whose mode of escape is a motorcycle. Finally, in both Vacas and Los amantes
del círculo polar, one set of actors plays multiple generations of characters. This
repetition of familiar faces on so many different levels establishes a cyclical sensation,
which complicates even further the chronology of each individual film. Evans links
Medem’s resistance to conventional narrative structures, or what she describes as his
sometimes “bewildering reluctance to impose a single ‘point of view’ on his films or on
their viewers,” to his “fierce reaction against totalitarian visions,” which she connects to
Medem’s frequent allusions in his films to his German grandfather, who had ties to
Nazism. Medem avoided being associated with that totalitarian ideology by fate, for his
grandfather’s death led his Spanish grandmother to take his then twelve-year-old father
back to Spain with her (Evans 21).
With these reflections on Medem’s treatment of chronology in his fictional films
in mind, I concur with the subtler examinations of La pelota vasca that argue that its
fragmented, nonlinear structure is not an attempt by Medem to manipulate viewers so as
to push forward a nationalist agenda. But I would also suggest that Medem’s stated goal
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of creating a fair and productive dialogue (and whether or not he succeeded in that
attempt), though certainly important, is not necessarily the most compelling aspect of the
La pelota vasca’s structure. I would instead point to another effect of Medem’s editing of
the interviews, which is the disruption of the teleological narratives that constitute
nationalist interpretations of history. I have in mind the types of narratives that Juaristi
exposes in the aforementioned El bucle melancólico. Juaristi argues that Basque
nationalists’ resistance to the Spanish State is perpetuated thanks to the intergenerational
transmission of tales of losses and defeats by Spanish forces. According to Juaristi, the
accumulation of these stories creates the myth of a primordial Basque paradise gradually
turned desert through a series of battles lost to its more powerful Spanish foe, and
encourages new generations to fight for its restoration (33-4). La pelota vasca discusses
with many of the historical events that Juaristi claims have been construed to fit the
nationalist agenda, such as Castile’s occupation in 1512 of Kingdom of Navarre, which
some argue constituted a medieval Basque proto-state; the abolition of the Basque’s
ancient foral system of local governance following the Second Carlist War in 1875; the
repression experienced by Basques under Franco’s authoritarian regime; and the murders
of innocent Basques at the hands of illegal antiterrorist groups (Grupos Antiterroristas de
Liberación, or GAL) funded by the PSOE-led Spanish government from 1983-87 (and
preceded by the first post-Franco “dirty war” under the UCD (1975-81)).
However, La pelota vasca complicates the myth of a series of historical defeats
not only by presenting varying interpretations of each historical moment, but also by
arranging them out of chronological order in non-narrative fashion. In this way, the film
rejects the linear conception of time upon which the overarching narratives that maintain
the Basque-Spanish opposition rely. While, as I show in Part One, Juaristi responds to
Basque nationalism’s series of historical myths with opposing Spanish nationalist
narratives that are equally teleological (by situating present-day Basque nationalism
within a long line of xenophobic totalitarianism extending all the way back to Inquisition,
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for example), Medem demonstrates a distrust in nationalist teleologies as he attempts to
view the Basque-Spanish conflict from outside of those narratives. The disorienting effect
of Medem’s fragmentation of the interviewees’ arguments could be interpreted as an
indicator of how difficult it is to perceive Spanish and Basque histories outside of
hegemonic nationalist discourses.
Another way that Medem’s editing challenges viewers’ preconceived
interpretations of historical events is through its blending of fictional and documentary
footage. Interspersed between the interviewers’ debates are rapidly moving montages that
jumble television news and documentary footage with clips from fictional films,
including Medem’s own Vacas. As the film glides from one image to another, viewers
are left to guess the original sources of the images or even whether each one is
documentary or fiction. Often, the speed of the editing makes it difficult for even the
well-informed viewer to identify every image’s original source. This seeping of
imaginary representations into La pelota vasca’s presentation of historical events is one
of the most striking characteristics of the documentary. In one example, a montage begins
with images of peace demonstrations and footage of burning buildings and ambulances
from news coverage of ETA attacks. Following is a clip from the ending of Imanol
Uribe’s 1994 action film Días contados, in which the protagonist, an etarra, guns down a
police officer on a Madrid sidewalk. Immediately after that appears an image of Gregorio
Ordoñez, a member of the Basque PP who was shot dead by two etarras at a San
Sebastián restaurant in January 1995. Seeing the two images side-by-side, the viewer
tends to piece together the fictional shooting with the face of the nonfictional victim to
form a cohesive narrative. Later in the same montage, a newsreel image of a car bomb
victim immediately precedes another shot from Días contados, this time of a car
exploding. Again, the real violence is undistinguishable from fictional representations of
that violence.
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Earlier in La pelota vasca, Medem juxtaposes clips from Gillo Pontecorvo’s
Operación Ogro (1979), a film based on the true story of the 1973 assassination of
Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, recently appointed by Franco as Prime Minister. Carrero
Blanco died when his car passed over a bomb planted by ETA and was hurled over a
five-story building. While one of the documentary’s interviewees is making reference to
the Carrero Blanco attack, Medem cuts to the Operación Ogro clip depicting the burning
car’s five-story fall. Following that is yet another clip from Operación Ogro of a group of
young Basque nationalists celebrating ETA’s victory, chanting “¡Voló, voló, Carrero
voló!” (The flight of Carrero Blanco, who is sometimes jokingly referred to as “el primer
astronaut español,” forms part of a motif of flight that I will explore in the next section.)
Finally, a third cut leads to news footage of a throng of youths cheering in a city street.
In yet another elaborate mixing of a real event with a fictional depiction of that
event Medem borrows a scene from Helena Taberna’s Yoyes (1999). Yoyes is based on
the story of a legendary former ETA leader, who, after becoming disillusioned with the
organization, exiled herself to Mexico. After the PSOE-led Spanish government granted
amnesty to former etarras hiding abroad, María Dolores Katarain, known as “Yoyes,”
returned to her hometown in Guipuzkoa in November of 1985. On September 10, 1986,
an etarra murdered her for her perceived betrayal of the organization. In La pelota vasca,
Medem cuts to a shot of the real Yoyes’s corpse lying on the ground right after showing
the cinematic depiction of Yoyes being shot at close range in broad daylight as she
played with her daughter at a public park.
Stone considers this unannounced interpolation of fictional scenes into authentic
newsreel of victims’ assassinations to be “the most problematic element” of the
documentary (198), particularly in cases like those cited above, where real and fictional
victims become indistinguishable. Stone views these montages as “injurious to the trust
of any spectators who are unaware of the deployed fiction and may therefore be
manipulated into an emotional response to these fictional killings that will affect their
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response to the real ones and the documentary as a whole” (198). I part from Stone’s
evaluation of this particular aspect of the film. Rather than an attempt at manipulating
viewers’ emotions, I would argue that La pelota vasca’s blending of fiction and
documentary is a reflection on how apparently “objective” facts are manipulated though
the act of perception. Again, I reach this conclusion by taking into account another
overarching characteristic of Medem’s cinematic production, which is the inclusion of
competing subjectivies.
The leaking of reality into fantasy and of fantasy into reality occurs in all of
Medem’s fictional works. For example, in La ardilla roja the male protagonist, who goes
by both Alberto and Jota, witnesses a motorcycle accident, and soon discovers that the
motorcyclist, whose real name is Sofía, has amnesia. Alberto/Jota renames her Lisa and
leads her to believe that they are romantic partners. Sofía/Lisa soon regains her memory
and realizes the truth about Alberto/Jota; however, she does not tell him that she
remembers her past. Alberto/Jota has suspicions about Sofía/Lisa’s sincerity, though,
which emerge the very morning after he meets her and decides to take advantage of her
amnesia. In this scene, Alberto/Jota sleeps in his bed while a documentary program about
red squirrels plays on a television nearby. As the camera scans Alberto/Jota, the
documentary narrator’s monotonous account of the red squirrel’s habits transforms into a
bizarre description of human-like behavior. The narrator says that red squirrels are
“mañosas, humildes y ligeras como las moscas, mentirosas, huidizas aunque estratégicas
y muy capaces de urdir planes a espaldas de los hombres.” Throughout the film,
Sofía/Lisa is likened to the red squirrel and Alberto/Jota to the fly (he is a former member
of a band called Las Moscas. It is clear that in this scene Alberto/Jota (and with him, the
viewer) hears a distorted version of the documentary’s voiceover that reveals his fear that
Sofía/Lisa may be just as deceitful as he is, hence the comparison of red squirrels to flies.
His suspicions are eventually verified when he learns that the “cunning” Sofía/Lisa was
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in fact faking her amnesia from the moment she was placed in the ambulance following
her motorcycle accident.
In Los amantes del círculo polar, the protagonists Otto and Ana meet at the age of
five, when her mother and his father become romantically involved and eventually move
in together. As adolescents, played by Víctor Hugo Oliveira and Kristel Díaz, they both
realize that they are in love, a fact that they must hide from their parents. Their budding
romance is recorded in a family photo, in which the young Otto holds in his hand a note
that Ana has secretly passed to him as they pose for the photo. With the note, Anna
invites Otto to sneak into her bedroom after dark to spend the night with her for the first
time. After that scene, actors Fele Martínez and Najwa Nimri take over the portrayal of
the now fully-grown Otto and Ana. Ana and Otto’s relationship continues into their
adulthood, until, eventually, tragic circumstances separate them. A few years later, Otto
returns to the home in which he fell in love with Ana to visit his father, who now lives
alone after having been abandoned by both children and his wife. Still perched on a small
table in the living room is the family photo from so many years ago. Otto gazes at the
photo, and the viewer, from Otto’s perspective, sees the same photo from earlier in the
film, except that Víctor Hugo Oliveira and Kristel Díaz, who originally appeared in the
photo, are replaced by Fele Martínez and Najwa Nimri. Otto’s memory of how Ana
looked the last time he was with her distorts the appearance of the photo.
In these examples from La ardilla roja and Los amantes del círculo polar,
Medem disorients viewers by momentarily allowing them to perceive the world through
the lens of a character’s subjectivity. In both cases, apparently objective snapshots of
reality - a nature documentary and a photograph - are altered by the characters’
perception. Etxebeste Gómez also highlights how in Los amantes del Círculo Polar
certain meaningful events in the plot are portrayed twice with slight variations between
the two versions, so as to represent each protagonist’s point of view. Through these
techniques, Medem aims to “contar la misma historia desde enfoques divergentes”
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(Etxebeste Gómez 51). By doing this, he also points to the existence of multiple realities,
problematizing pretensions to objectivity.
It could likewise be argued that in La pelota vasca the scenes from Medem’s own
Vacas represent the filmmaker’s own imaginings of Basque nationalism leaking into his
supposedly “objective” documentary, and that the scenes from other filmmakers, such as
Uriba, Pontecorvo, and Taberna multiply the layers of subjectivity. Throughout all of his
work Medem questions the possibility of attaining objectivity, and in La pelota vasca he
demonstrates that it is even more unlikely that one maintain an objective stance when
confronted with a topic as emotionally charged as the Basque-Spanish nationalist
conflict. Instead of following the conventions of what are normally considered objective
documentary films, Medem’s editing, which calls attention to, as opposed to concealing,
his role in shaping the film’s narrative, all but announces its subjectiveness. Thus, while
Medem threatens the viewer’s trust in his project by inserting fictional representations
among authentic news footage, he also undermines the notion that there exist supposedly
“objective” perspectives, while also questioning the documentary’s privileged status
relative to fiction as a vehicle for discovering truth. As Medem once stated in an
interview, “‘A veces es necesario poner tu mirada más cerca de lo fantástico que de lo
real para poder ver las cosas’” (Medem qtd. in Gómez Etxebeste 55). I contend that
Medem’s openly subjective treatment of the topic of Basque and Spanish nationalisms
goes hand in hand with his refusal to adopt a singular chronological account of history,
together constituting a rejection of the limitations and inflexibility inherent to the
purportedly objective discourse.
Without a doubt the most contentious aspect of Medem’s editing of La pelota
vasca is the way it presents the interviews with victims of terrorism. As I briefly
mentioned above, the segments of the documentary that break up the rapid succession of
arguments and opinions are those in which the camera rests on the victims as they share
their stories. The camera spends considerably more uninterrupted time focused on each
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victim than on the rest of the interviewees. It is as though Medem were pausing the
heated intellectual pelota match so as to reflect on the tragedy left in its wake. According
to Barrentxea Marañón’s account, these victims’ segments were the most frequently and
vehemently criticized elements of the film. This is because in four different scenes,
Medem counterposes two victims’ narratives in a parallel fashion. In one case, Medem
aligns Eduardo Medina, a young socialist activist who tells how he lost his leg and nearly
his life when ETA bombed his car, with Anika Gil, a young woman who recounts the five
days during which she was interrogated and tortured by Pamplona’s Civil Guard for her
suspected involvement with ETA. Medem alternates between brief segments of the two
victims’ stories seven times. This is not the only case of La pelota vasca’s pairing of
victims from opposite sides of the political battle. The most often cited moment is when
Cristina Sagarzazu, the widow of a Basque police officer who was killed by an ETAplanted car bomb, describes her painful experience at the same time that the wife of an
imprisoned ETA member shares her experiences as she travels to the prison for a visit.
This scene consists of a series of 14 cuts that alternate between the two women. They
speak of similar topics, such as their weddings, their children, and their hopes for the
future.
This apparent equating of the two women’s suffering caused a great deal of
outrage. As Smith puts it, “such sequences suggest a false moral equivalence between the
two sides,” (“La pelota vasca”), and it is for this reason that he accuses Medem of being
an ETA apologist. Pablo takes issue with the two women’s stories’ symmetrical
presentation for the same reason as Smith does, arguing that it “invites viewers to see a
deliberately calculated murder as being of the same moral order as the incarceration of a
convicted felon in a geographically distant correctional facility” (Pablo 388). Yet again, I
propose a consideration of La pelota vasca’s symmetrical pairing of the victims’
narratives in light of the multitude of examples of duality in Medem’s fictional films.
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For example, in the aforementioned La ardilla roja, the protagonists Alberto/Jota
and Sofía/Lisa have dual identities: the ones belonging to their pasts, and the new ones
that take shape during the remainder of the film. Sofía/Lisa intentionally adopts the
identity that Alberto/Jota invents for her during her lapse in memory, while Alberto/Jota
likewise reinvents himself as Sofía/Lisa’s partner. Thus, the two create their new selves
through one another. Similarly, the protagonist of Tierra, Ángel, suffers because his dual
identities have conflicting desires for two very different women: Mari and Ángela (whose
name suggests another layer of Ángel’s duality). The conflict is resolved in the end when
he chooses Mari and he and his “angel” physically separate. This ending could be
interpreted as Ángel’s resolution of his inner contradiction through the connection he
establishes with Mari.
Etxebeste Gómez, as he reflects on Medem’s preference for love stories, observes
the way that his characters tend to create or discover their identities through love (132133). And Evans sees in Medem’s work an exploration of the way that “our sense of
identity derives not only from the way we see ourselves but from the way we are seen by
others” (112). Another example of this can be found in a scene from Medem’s original
Lucía y el sexo script, cited by Etxebeste Gómez, in which Lucía reflects on Lorenzo’s
novel: “Porque también para eso nos sirven las historias, a nosotros, a mí como lectora,
para que nos metamos dentro de otros personajes y nos preguntemos qué haríamos en su
lugar” (Medem qtd. in E.G. 134).
This Levinian notion that the subject is formed through a relationship with an
Other is one that Medem explores in all of his work. Interpreting the duality that Medem
sets up between Cristina Sagarzazu and the etarra’s wife and between Eduardo Medina
and Anika Gil within this ethical context allows for a departure from the moralistic
judgments of these sequences. By putting the victims face to face with their Others as
they give heartfelt accounts of their sorrow, La pelota vasca transgresses the political
discourses that forbid such emotional face-to-face encounters by condemning them as
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immoral comparisons. The comment that Medem’s collaborator Ione Hernández makes
about her experience interviewing the imprisoned etarras’ families for the film - that
their “pain is beyond any political conflict” (qtd. in Stone, Julio Medem 184) - reaffirms
the film’s ethical (as opposed to political) orientation. In my view, Medem’s rejection of
rationalist, teleological political discourses through his editing of La pelota vasca reveals
an attempt at escaping the polarization and denial of ambiguity that inhibit mutual
understanding, in spite of the polarized reception of the film.
Rising above Nationalist Symbolism
Even if one interprets Medem’s editing of La pelota vasca as a rejection of
limiting political discourses, as I do, there still remains the fact that the film is packed
with images and sounds that are traditionally associated with an idealized rural Basque
culture that has long been celebrated by Basque nationalists. The predominance of
Basque nationalist symbolism, many critics argue, problematizes Medem’s intention of
recognizing multiple points of view. They interpret it as a sentimentalist defense of a
Basque nationalist worldview. The most frequently cited example is the central role that
rural Basque landscapes play in La pelota vasca. These landscapes provide the backdrop
for most of the interviews. Some interviewees sit at the edge of a jagged cliff overlooking
the Bay of Biscay, others in the middle of a dense forest or above a lush, green valley
spotted with farmhouses. Also, interspersed within segments of interviews are clips from
the Basque Public Television (Euskal Telebista, or ETB) series La mirada mágica, which
consists entirely of sweeping overhead views of the Basque landscape shot from a small
helicopter.
Even those critics who otherwise praise La pelota vasca take issue with these
abundant images of Basque landscape, associating them with a nationalist point of view.
One such critic is Nathan Richardson, who contends that without “the nuance provided in
his fictional films,” Medem’s use of landscape in the documentary “threatens to
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perpetuate myths rather than problematize them” (303). Richardson observes that Basque
space has always been contested, citing disputes over what to call the Basque Country
(Euskadi, Euskal Herria, País Vasco, etc.) and whether or not its territory includes
France’s Basque Provinces and Navarra (261-62). And he identifies Basque nationalism
since its origins as essentially a reaction to the “loss of place and threat to sovereign
space” (265), beginning with the Carlists’ fight to maintain the fueros and against the
industrialization and accompanying immigration that modernization would bring (26364). To describe the symbolic importance of landscape in the Basque nationalist
imaginary Richardson cites Juaristi’s article “The Space of Intrahistory: The Construction
and Dissolution of Nationalist Landscape.” Juaristi explains how landscape can serve as a
reminder of the “fleetingness of human life and the eternity of the nation,” which
“mold(s) the spirit of future generations in the image of likeness of present and past
generations, thereby ensuring the continuity of the people.” In this way, “the landscape
transforms individual contingency into collective transcendence” (319). Due to this
powerful symbolism with which nationalism has imbued Basque landscape, Richardson
seems to agree with Kepa Aulestia’s (a converted critic of Basque nationalism like
Juaristi) assertion that it is impossible to view Basque landscape “‘con mirada limpia’”
(Aulestia qtd. in Barrenetxea 151).
Richardson and Aulestia are not alone; Stone also contends that La pelota vasca’s
“shots of luminous green and snowy landscapes suggest over-determined reflections of
the nationalist celebration of rural Basqueness” (Julio Medem 202). Ann Davies further
develops Stone’s reference to Basque nationalism’s especial emphasis on rural culture. In
her view, La pelota vasca is problematic in its marginalization of Basque urban spaces,
which not only appear infrequently, but when they do appear are often found within
montages of violence (88). In this way, argues Davies, La pelota vasca reinforces a
divide between the edenic rural space of the Basque motherland and “outside” urban
spaces (94). She explains how this binary is apparent in ETA’s treatment of landscape. It
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is not only that the densely forested mountains of Guipúzkoa serve as ETA’s home base,
meeting spot, and training ground; these rural landscapes also represent their cause. They
are the untouchable symbolic space that ETA aims to protect through the violent actions
it performs in urban spaces (94). Davies’s observation regarding the sacredness of
Basque rural space for ETA is supported by the group’s numerous efforts to sabotage
urbanization projects that would have altered the landscape. For example, the
construction of a nuclear plant in the coastal town of Lemóniz was permanently halted in
1984 due to threats from ETA. In 1995, the Leizarán highway was finally completed after
six years of disruptions and the killing by etarras of four people related to the
construction project. A more recent example occurred in late 2008, when two ETA
members shot and killed the owner of one of the construction companies involved the
construction of the “Y Vasca,” a high velocity train that would connect the capital cities
of the three Spanish Basque provinces and eventually link the AVE train from Madrid to
Paris.
In an anthropological study of Basque baserri (“farmstead”) culture Joseba
Zulaika uncovers the roots of the nationalist rural/urban divide that Davies describes.
Zulaika calls attention to the etymology of the compound word baserri. Baso, meaning
forest, is related to basati an adjective used to describe a wild or untamed animal, and
refers more generally to the realm of wilderness. The second root is erria, comes from
herria, meaning people or community. The word’s etymology reveals baserri culture’s
liminal position between undomesticated wilderness and civilization. He goes on to
explain that Basque nationalism had traditionally celebrated baserri culture because it
serves a reminder of an imagined original, wild state to which the nationalist desires the
Basque Country to revert (Basque Violence 244). Considering just how charged a symbol
Basque landscape is, it is not difficult to understand why many critics would view La
pelota vasca’s notable preference for rural over urban backdrops as Medem’s adoption of
a nationalist view of landscape as sacred.
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Along with the sweeping shots of landscape, La pelota vasca features images of a
number of traditional sports that are rooted in rural Basque culture, such as stone lifting,
tug-o-war, wood chopping, and of course, pelota. Some critics of the documentary
pointed out its favoring of these traditional, especially rural, sports over others that are
more popular in the present day, like soccer or cycling. In their view, the focus on sports
that are unique to the Basque Country not only promotes the notion of Basque
exceptionalism, but also draws an incomplete portrait of contemporary Basque society
(Barrentxea Marañón 157). Mikel Oriondo (a founder of Foro Babel and ¡Basta Ya!), in
an article published in ABC, says that La pelota vasca’s seemingly romantic portrayal of
rural Basque culture exudes a “tufillo etnicista y de orgullo identitario vasco” (Iriondo
qtd. in Basterretxea 148).
The impression that viewers like Oriondo came away with regarding La pelota
vasca’s emphasis on rural Basque traditions stems from the important role that such
traditions have played in the construction of a collective Basque identity that is distinct
from a Spanish one. Thomas Harrington locates this symbolic function of Basque sports
at the time of the emergence of Basque nationalism, when its founder Sabino Arana, due
to a relatively sparse literary foundation upon which to establish a language-based
Basque identity (due in part to the historical predominance of oral transmission of
knowledge through bertsolaris), instead looked to traditional sports - and race, as is well
known - as a way to define Basqueness (118-19). This symbolic function of traditional
sports continues in the present day, according to Carmelo Urza. In a study on the cultural
significance of Basque sports, Urza suggests that these outmoded sports survive today
because participants and fans are “motivated by an urgency to grasp the archetypal
symbols of the past” as a way of fostering a communal identity and “manifesting their
unique identity as Basques” (Urza 256).
Further politicizing the prevalence of rural Basque landscapes and traditions in La
pelota vasca is that Medem’s portrayal of them evokes Nestor Basterretxea and Fernando
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Larruquert’s 1968 documentary Ama Lur (Madre Tierra). Ama Lur was the first featurelength film produced in the Basque Country since the end of the Civil War, and it played
an important part in the Basque cultural resistance movement that developed during the
second half of the dictatorship. Ama Lur is a compilation of images and sounds
showcasing Basque landscapes, festivals, dances, music, sports, mythology, the fishing,
shipbuilding, and steel industries, essentially constituting an audiovisual catalogue of a
particular idea of Basqueness. Pablo likens Ama Lur to other Basque documentaries
produced under under Franco and that, due to restrictive censorship laws, could not
include political content or the Basque language and therefore resorted to “folkloric and
romantic depictions of the Basque Country . . . without the nationalist political overlay”
(58). More than its predecessors, though, Ama Lur became an key symbol of the Basque
nationalist cultural resistance, and as Pablo reports, was even referenced by ETA as a
justification for its cause: “A communiqué issued by ETA in 1970 included among the
evidence of the repression of the Basques under Franco’s regime the fact that Ama Lur
had been ‘revised, controlled, and mutilated until it was deprived as much as possible of
any Basque content’” (Pablo 62). Here the dictatorship’s censoring of Ama Lur is
symbolic of its repression of Basque culture as a whole.
That ETA found inspiration in Ama Lur may be related to the fact that the film
was heavily influenced by Jorge de Oteiza’s (1908-2003) work. Oteiza, whom Joseba
Zulaika calls the “most influential Basque aesthete and mythologizer” (“Anthropologists”
143), dedicated himself to sculpture until 1959, after which he chose to focus on writing
about aesthetics and anthropology. While Oteiza was never directly connected to ETA’s
activities, according to Cameron Watson he greatly “influenced the intellectual discourse
of the organization” (Watson 201). Oteiza’s artistic and theoretical production focus on
articulating “the differential quality that defined the Basques” (207-8). To do so, Oteiza
looks all the way back to the prehistoric cave paintings and dolmens that can be found in
the Basque region. Watson explains that for Oteiza the dolmen, with its basic shape of a
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circle with an empty center, symbolizes the prehistoric freedom of the Basque culture,
before that space became occupied by an invading Spanish culture. Thus, the notion of
deoccupation became essential for Oteiza: “Deoccupation was thus a cleansing or curing
experience for Oteiza, leading to the empty and true Basque space” (209). Citing the
etymological link between the Basque words for (empty) container (aska) and freedom
(askatasuna), Watson makes the case that Oteiza’s theories were fundamental to ETA’s
conception of the goal of their armed struggle as the deoccupation of the Spanish State
from the Basque Country (10).
Ama lur presents Oteiza as an exemplary artist for his work in recuperating a
primordial Basque identity, a mission that the film openly promotes. After showing
images of prehistoric stone structures, cave drawings, and fossils, Basterretxea and
Larruquert cut to footage of Oteiza working on a sculpture while the narrator stresses the
important role of artists in the revival of the Basque “herencia cultural” and the
“recuperación de nuestro alma.” The final words of Ama Lur quote Oteiza, who says
“Pues, el hombre no poseerá otro pueblo, otra historia, otra lengua, ni otro porvenir que
los que cada día de su vida sea capaz de forjar.” This notion of shaping one’s own
people, history, and culture implies not only a denunciation of what he viewed as a
centuries-long imposition of Spanish culture upon the Basque people, but also an
acknowledgment of the conscious effort that he and other artists of the Basque cultural
resistance were making to “invent” a nation through creative production that draws on a
prehistoric (and thus, pre-Spanish) period.
La pelota vasca includes a sequence that features works by Oteiza as well as other
artists whose aesthetics have become synonymous with the Basque cultural revival,
including sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) - a long-time adversary of Oteiza, who
accused him of plagiarizing his abstract style, including his use of iron and the motif of
the empty circle - and painter and sculptor Agustín Ibarrola (b. 1930), who was mentored
by Oteiza. Medem includes images of Chillida’s and Oteiza’s famous examples of “living
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art,” in which the work is integrated into the natural landscape. The first is Chillida’s “El
Peine del Viento,” a cluster of iron statues that meld into the rocks that are constantly
struck by wind and waves along San Sebastian’s coastline, and the second is Agustín
Ibarrola’s “El Bosque Animado,” brightly colored paintings of animal, human, and
abstract geometrical figures on the tree trunks of the Oma Valley forest. All three of these
artists’ works have been appropriated by mainstream nationalism as symbols of Basque
identity. The PNV’s embrace of these artists’ works is evidenced by how many of them
have been erected in public spaces throughout the Basque Country. The ubiquitousness of
Oteiza’s and Chillida’s abstract iron statues especially creates the impression that the
Basque Country and their aesthetics are one in the same. In the cases of the “living art,”
the works literally do become one with the landscape and therefore seem as though they
have formed part of the space since prehistory.
In addition to borrowing footage from Ama Lur, La pelota vasca imitates many
aspects of its aesthetic, including its sweeping overhead shots of landscape, its favoring
of rural over urban images and customs, and its featuring of artists whose works were
either envisioned or adopted by others as part of a Basque nation-making project. It may
be in part because of its similarities to Ama Lur’s nationalist vision that Savater likened
La pelota vasca to Nazi propaganda films (qtd. in Gómez L-Quiñones 150, note 11).
Medem clearly inserts La pelota vasca into the Basque nationalist documentary tradition
represented by Ama Lur. It does not come as a surprise that Medem’s borrowing from
this openly propagandist artistic tradition, especially in light of his public
pronouncements about his goal of transcending the political divide in La pelota vasca,
subjected him to so many accusations of bias. However, while the film’s many detractors
interpret this adoption of Ama Lur’s symbolic discourse as a point of weakness in which
Medem’s unabashed nationalist sentimentalism comes to light, it is my contention that he
consciously imitates La pelota vasca’s cinematic precursors so as to problematize
precisely the symbolism that he appropriates from them.
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My alternative interpretation of the predominance of Basque nationalist
symbolism in La pelota vasca will stem from my analysis of Medem’s treatment of
gender constructs in the documentary, an aspect of the film that critics have yet to
examine. A close look at the way Medem questions the traditional definitions of
masculinity at the root of the Basque nationalist vision presented in Ama Lur reveals that
he does not simply adopt nationalist symbolism sentimentally or unquestioningly, but
rather that he reconfigures it. To begin, it is necessary to consider the way that gender is
constructed in Ama Lur before examining how Medem dismantles those gender
categories in La pelota vasca. Rob Stone and Helen Jones analyze the mythical figures of
the ama lur (the Earth Mother) and the gudari (the Warrior) and their representation in
Basque cinema, starting with Ama Lur. According to Stone and Jones, the gender ideals
that the ama lur and gudari represent are maternal passivity for the former and aggressive
courage for the latter (44), and that in Ama Lur these are maintained through a
traditionally gendered division of space into public and private spheres. They explain,
“Ama Lur . . . delineates male and female spaces in its utopian Euskal Herria to such an
extent that elements of Basqueness are polarized around stereotypical representations of
gender. The female space is private and passive – women are seen only briefly in the
context of segregated religious or homely rituals – while the male space is public and
active, profusely illustrated by a plethora of brutal Basque sports” (45). Although La
pelota vasca features many of the same landscapes, rituals, and sports that appear in Ama
Lur, it does not conform to the same division of male and female spaces.
This can be seen first of all in Medem’s treatment of the wild rural spaces within
which, as we have seen, Basque nationalism and Ama Lur locate masculinity. Throughout
his fictional oeuvre Medem configures wilderness as a space of escape. The thick
Guipuzkoan forest of Vacas, the isolated campground of La ardilla roja, and the sparsely
populated Mediterranean island of Lucía y el sexo all function not only as zones of escape
for the characters at the level of plot, but they also symbolize escapes from rigid
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patriarchal structures, structures that shape traditional Basque nationalist ideology. For
example, Vacas portrays three generations of an intense rivalry between two neighboring
families of rural Guipúzkoa: the Mendiluzes and the Irigibels. According to Luis MartínEstudillo, these two families represent an opposition between two identitarian options.
The first option, represented by the Mendiluz family, is to remain locked in to a stagnant
nationalist ideology determined by genealogical purity and masculine hegemony. The
other, represented by the Irigibel family, tends toward identitarian flexibility and mixing
with the Other as a means of escaping traditional definitions of masculinity and
nationalism. Martín-Estudillo identifies the forest as the space where the Irigibel’s
dynamic mixing can occur: “El bosque, tal y como Medem nos lo presenta, simboliza un
espacio alternativo a la concepción de un territorio exclusivista postulado por una
concepción excluyente de la identidad” (349). It is in the forest, after all, where Ignacio
Irigibel and Catalina Mendiluz transgress the barrier between their families and conceive
their son, Peru, who represents the mixing of Irigibel and Mendiluz blood. It is also
where Manuel, the Irigibel who decades earlier refused to die on a battlefield during the
Carlist War, finally chooses to die after a lifetime of alienation from a community that
labeled him a coward for not offering his blood to the patria.
In La ardilla roja and Lucía y el sexo it is the female protagonist who escapes a
relationship with a physically or emotionally abusive man by transporting herself to a
wild space. Another more recent example of Medem’s configuration of the forest as a
female space associated with escape is his 2007 digital short En las ramas de Ana. This
short stars his then three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Ana who, standing among trees
and chirping birds next to a lake, has a conversation with an imaginary friend behind the
camera named Itziar. (Itziar’s part of the dialogue appears in captions.) At the beginning
of the video a caption explains that “Itziar es un hada de 14 años, que ve a Ana a través
de la cámara, desde otro bosque” (97). Ana shows Itziar the different kinds of trees and
animals that surround her, assigning them creative names. Here the forest functions as a
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space for his daughter’s playful exploration and discovery. Far from confining his female
characters within the domestic sphere, Medem situates them in wild, open spaces that
liberate them and permit their creative expression. Thus, for Medem the forest is a space
that conveys meaning beyond Basque nationalism’s limited interpretations of it. Rather
than setting his stories within the wilderness in order to uphold traditional nationalist
perspectives, Medem gives those spaces new meanings associated with escape and
transgression.
Suggesting a continuation in La pelota vasca of this connection between
wilderness and escape or transgression is the documentary’s final sequence, which begins
with the camera rushing along a grassy runway in preparation for takeoff. (This footage
comes from the aforementioned La mirada mágica.) After that Medem’s camera sweeps
one-by-one over the heads of each interviewee who has appeared in the film. Medem has
stated that he envisions the camera’s upward flight at the end of the documentary as his
transformation into a bird that flies between two cliffs representing the opposing
identitarian and political visions offered by Basque and Spanish nationalisms (“Un
pájaro”). Medem carries the spectator with him as he soars upward and away from the
interviewees - and by extension the debate itself -, escaping the violent confrontation
enacted in the metaphorical frontón de pelota below. Reflecting a similar sentiment also
through a bird metaphor is one of the songs from the film’s soundtrack. The majority of
La pelota vasca’s soundtrack comes from Gernika zuzenean 2, an album by beloved
Basque singer-songwriter Mikel Laboa (1934-2008), whose blend of experimental
elements and folk influences and resistance to Francoist cultural repression (by using
non-linguistic sounds and onomatopoeia instead of Spanish when lyrics in Basque were
prohibited) situate him within the same broad cultural revival movement as Basterretxea,
Larruquert, and Oteiza. One of the Laboa songs that Medem chooses for La pelota vasca
is called “Txoria txori” (txoria means “bird”). In this song Laboa sings “If I had cut off
its wings, it would have been mine, it wouldn’t have escaped. But then it would no longer
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be a bird. And the bird is what I loved” (translation from the original Basque taken La
pelota vasca’s English subtitles). These lyrics add to La pelota vasca’s configuration of
the bird as a symbol of freedom and escape from restrictive definitions, whether
nationalist or patriarchal. As Stone notices, Laboa’s characteristic singing of nonlinguistic sounds likens him to a bird (Julio Medem 200). Following this, one could say
that just as Medem adopts the bird’s point of view with the soaring camera at the end of
La pelota vasca, he adopts the bird’s voice by communicating through Laboa’s music.
Medem’s employment of the symbol of the bird is not limited to La pelota vasca.
It appears in another digital short called Clecla (2001), this one starring his other
daughter Alicia, who was eight years old at the time, and her imaginary friend, Clecla. In
this one, the charismatic Alicia sits outside on a patio across from Medem as he (through
captions) asks Alicia questions about Clecla, who we are to imagine sitting in the empty
chair next to Alicia. Alicia turns to consult with Clecla before providing Medem with
amusing answers to his questions. (For example, after asking Clecla about her favorite
movies, Alicia teasingly assures Medem that his movies are Clecla’s favorites.) In
between the questions and responses, the camera cuts to the flock of swallows noisily
flying overhead. The swallows’ chirps represent Clecla’s voice. When Medem asks
Alicia if Clecla can fly, Alicia responds “Cuando se muere, vuela como los pájaros,” and
then flaps her arms and whistles in imitation of the birds. This short, like En las ramas de
Ana, is a snapshot of his daughter’s youthful imagination and creativity, and also
demonstrates a continuation of Medem’s interest in the idea of self-discovery through the
(in this case imaginary) Other.50 Both the forest and the bird, it seems, form part of the
50 Alicia, for whom Medem named his production company Alicia Produce, has Down
syndrome, and in addition to her role in Clecla she has been a source of inspiration in his work as
a producer on films like Qué tienes debajo del sombrero? (2006), a documentary directed by his
partner and Alicia’s mother Lola Barrera and Iñaki Peñafiel featuring the acclaimed American
artist and person with Down syndrome Judith Scott, and Yo también (2009), an award-winning
feature film by Álvaro Pastor and Antonio Naharro about a love story between Daniel, the first
person with Down syndrome to earn a university diploma (in this aspect mirroring actor Pablo
Pineda’s biography) and his colleague (Lola Dueñas).
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same symbolic catalogue through which Medem strives to escape restrictive discourses
and structures.
Further evidence of this is the reappearance of the bird after La pelota vasca in
Medem’s 2007 feature-length film Caótica Ana. Here the dove symbolizes the female
protagonist, Ana, and her solidarity with (and supernatural connection to) a series of
women throughout history and across the world who under various circumstances fell
victim to horrible acts of violence inflicted by men in reaction to perceived threats to
their power. According to Medem, he meant for Caótica Ana to be “ una oda a la lucha
ancestral de la mujer” (Medem qtd. in Etxebeste Gómez 41). Though Caótica Ana was
possibly Medem’s least successful film among critics and at the box office,51 it does
offer added insight into the symbolic connection between female transgression of
patriarchal boundaries and bird-like flight. This association of the bird with specifically
female forms of escape has not been explored by critics, most of whom, in spite Medem’s
much studied tendency to express his overarching aesthetic and thematic concerns
outside the boundaries of the individual film, have tended to limit their interpretation of
this symbol to the context of La pelota vasca and Medem’s discussion of it in “Un pájaro
vuela” as a vehicle for gaining an objective point of view.
In La pelota vasca, Medem juxtaposes the symbol of the soaring bird as a means
of escape from inhibiting, especially patriarchal, structures with another set of symbolic
animals that represent those structures. These symbols appear in two montages featuring
traditional Basque sports and which mimic (and borrow footage from) a montage in Ama
Lur that includes several images of rural sports competitions, some featuring animals,
such as bulls pulling heavy stones and head-butting rams, and others men, like woodchopping, stone-lifting, pelota, jai alai, and rowing. In La pelota vasca, these montages
51 Etxebeste Gómez suggests - and I agree with him - that Medem, in his characteristic
desire to transcend ever more boundaries, tried unsuccessfully in Caótica Ana to encapsulate too
many settings and historical moments within one story (150).
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function as climactic scenes. In one of them, which appears near the end of the film,
Medem juxtaposes shots of two head-butting rams fenced inside a ring surrounded by
onlookers with shots of male athletes competing in traditional sports like tug-o-war and
rowing. The images of the ram fight come from Asier Altuna’s short film Topeka (2004),
and the rest from various sources, including contemporary documentaries and Ama lur.
As the montage develops, Medem cuts to a bizarre moment in Topeka when the men
watching the dueling rams become so stirred, or enraged, by the competition that they
begin to head-butt one another. The association of the men with the quarreling animals is
more than evident. The music accompanying this scene, another song by Laboa called
“Baga-biga-higa (Lekeitio 2),” add to its intensity. Unlike the gentle melody and acoustic
guitar of the aforementioned “Txoria txori,” this rousing march features heavy
percussion, an ever accelerating, snare drum-driven cadence, harsh-sounding consonants
(“ikimilikiliklik”) and lyrics connoting gunfire (“arma, tira, pum”). The combination of
music and images in this stirring montage induces an immediate emotional response, but
it also includes an implicit critique of male-driven violence.
Further evidence of this is another montage in which Medem alternates between
shots of oxen competing in a stone-dragging contest and a variety of both news and
fictional footage of ETA violence, including explosions, destroyed buildings and cars,
maimed victims, and funeral services. What differs Medem’s traditional sports montages
from Ama Lur’s is his insertion of footage of ETA violence, of Altuna’s fictional headbutting scene, and of Laboa’s bellicose “Baga Biga Higa.” These additions mark the key
distinction between Medem’s critical view of the sports he depicts and Barrenetxea’s and
Larruquert’s exaltation of those same sports. While I agree with the many critics, like
Pablo, who viewed La pelota vasca’s sports montages as representative of “the
intractable nature of Basque politics” (Pablo 385), I would also argue that Medem goes
even further in these scenes by pointing out what he sees as the root cause of ETA
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violence, namely the aggressive masculinity that thrives in the male-dominated culture of
rural Basque sports.
In his anthropological study of a rural community in Guipúzkoa, Joseba Zulaika
reflects on the critical role that traditional sports play in the formation of young
generations’ political mentalities. He argues that competitive sports like wood-cutting,
tug-of-war, stone-lifting, and pelota are exclusively male-dominated, inherently
antagonistic, and unambiguously bipolar in that they allow only one winner and one
loser. Zulaika mentions that soccer or cycling, for example, which are presently the most
popular sports in the Basque Country, differ from traditional sports because even though
“polarized schemes can be detected in these competitive games as well, … the strictly
bipolar frame is definitely abandoned” (Basque Violence 176). Individual soccer matches
and cycling competitions are generally part of a larger tournament cycle including more
than two teams, resulting in numerous losers and winners of varying degrees.
Urza likewise highlights the bipolar nature of traditional Basque sports,
explaining that since their beginnings they were not “motivated by some kind of sporting
spirit or sports culture. Rather they were motivated, at least in part, by a deeply ingrained
sense of challenge, opposition, and defiance . . .” (246). In other words, the goal in these
sports is not merely to participate, but to win, and this, argues Urza, is both a reflection of
and contributor to the culture’s underlying values (246). It is also noteworthy that these
sports, which function like “extensions of the workplace” (246) and therefore reward
skills needed for rural labor traditionally performed by men, tend to require “sheer brute
strength” over skill (248). Not surprisingly, considering its origins in exclusively male
activities and rewarding of brawn over, say, finesse, even today “traditional sports are not
easily accessible for women” (Urza 252). In choosing to feature rural Basque sports over
others, it is my contention that Medem seeks to reflect on the way these sports foster the
specifically masculine antagonism that manifests itself in ETA’s terrorist attacks.
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In this way, Medem sets up a contrast between the violent antagonism represented
by the images of rams, oxen, and bulls and the liberating symbol of the bird. Medem’s
comparison of violent nationalism to combative animals originates in baserri culture.
According to Zulaika’s study, it is not uncommon for ETA to be likened to a cornered
animal. In Itziar, the rural Guipúzkoan community where he conducted his field research,
when individuals were asked about local young men who had joined ETA, they would
often compare them to cornered animals unable to restrain their instincts to attack (244,
253). This is evidence that “animals provide identities and behavioral patterns that are
most expressive of [ETA’s] survival-oriented resistance” (242). Zulaika exemplifies this
with an anecdote about an Itziar taurine fiesta during which a fenced-in bull is taunted
and provoked by the surrounding spectators, who then must quickly dodge the
disoriented bull’s attacks. Occasionally, the usually tame bull grows so distressed by its
entrapment that it leaps above the fence and surrounding spectators to run mendian gora
(up the mountain) - its usual habitat. This notion of upward movement formed part of the
rhetoric of some of the earliest Basque nationalist political organizations, which
originated as mountaineering clubs in the early 1900s. The slogan they coined, and that is
still prevalent today, is “Gora Euskadi Askatuta!” (“Rise up Free Euskadi!”), which is
often shortened to “Gora!” (“Rise up!”). The PNV’s official hymn begins “Gora ta gora
Euskadi” (“Up and up with Euskadi”) (Basque Violence 256). ETA, like the taunted bull,
perceives itself in a situation of enclosure created by the Spanish State. Also like the bull,
ETA resorts to its savage instincts as it desperately attempts to escape cultural enclosure.
Its only option is to leap up and out of its enclosure:
The idea of closure is essential for creating a frame of
domestication for animals and of enculturation for people;
wildness implies liberation. Different degrees of cultural enclosure
may either generate a process of adaptive learning or lead to
labyrinthine confusion. In the latter case, in order to regain the
original freedom one has to symbolically “raise up”; images of
verticality such as mountains and trees serve for metaphorically
performing this ascension. “Up there” the untamed original society
and ascendant freedom reign. (Basque Violence 242)
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The etarra believes his only option is to leap up, through violent struggle, to return the
Basque Country to its uncivilized primordial state.
To better understand how gender may play into this understanding of ETA as an
animal leaping out of its enclosure, I turn to Nancy Chodorow’s reflection, from a
psychoanalytical perspective, on the intersection of masculinity and aggression.
Chodorow seeks to understand why it is the case that men are responsible for the
overwhelming majority of individual and cultural violence. She cites Melanie Klein’s
theories on aggression’s relationship to the individual’s sense of self to suggest that
aggression “emerges as a defense against an endangered self (the sense of danger being
physiological, a fantasied or perceived threat of physical or emotional attack, punitive
guilt, shame and humiliation, a threat of fragmentation - and danger can be felt to come
from within or from without) . . .” (243). Following this theory, she argues that men may
be more prone to aggressive behavior due to the comparatively more oppositional nature
traditional masculine identities. She explains that while masculinity is built upon a “manboy” dichotomy upheld by threats of humiliation from other men, and which “becomes
linked with fears of feminization (the male-female dichotomy)” (256), constructions of
feminine identity are not cast in such oppositional terms: “Seeing the self as not the other,
defining the self in opposition, does not seem generally as important to women as to men,
nor does merging seem as threatening” (253). For this reason, men’s “sense of
masculinity is also generally more fragile than women’s sense of femininity” (253),
which leads them to feel threatened or humiliated more easily, and therefore act out
violently with greater frequency.
According to Chodorow, if masculine aggression on an individual level functions
as a defensive reaction to humiliation and fear of fragmentation of the self, cultural
violence likewise comes about in reaction to perceived threats to collective identity:
“violence becomes a way to affirm collective selfhood and identity as much as it affirms
individual selfhood” (245). Collective violence, which is incited and carried out almost
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exclusively by men through male-dominated institutions, like the military, also stems
from a perceived connection between outside threats to collective identity and
masculinity: “When social wholes fracture, and identity, via conscious and unconscious
concepts of peoplehood, nation, or ethnos, is threatened, for men, especially, gender
identity seem to fracture along similar lines. This reinforces the threat to selfhood and
leads to reactive, hate-filled violence” (256). The notion of the etarra as a wild bull
breaking out of its enclosure to return to its original habitat resonates with Chodorow’s
theory, for it suggests a Basque national identity that is threatened, humiliated, and
emasculated by a more powerful Spanish State that imposes its political structure upon
the Basques. Within this conception, Spain’s denial of Basque sovereignty could be
interpreted as the fragmentation of a collective Basque identity that cannot be whole until
it returns to its primordial, pre-Spanish condition. It follows, then, that ETA’s violent
response to the threat that the Spanish Other poses to a Basque collective self stems from
a specifically masculine construct of Basque national identity understood in strictly
oppositional terms. La pelota vasca’s symbolic interlinking of ETA terrorism to bipolar,
male-dominated sports and aggressive, animal-like behaviors insightfully exposes the
gender constructs that perpetuate the antagonistic relationship between Basque and
Spanish nationalisms. At the same time, Medem’s bird, associated with the transgression
of patriarchal structures and the characteristically feminine (in Chodorow’s view)
openness to merging with the Other, points to a transcendence of the polarization
represented by the bulls and rams.
With the contrasting ram/bull and bird symbols, Medem establishes an opposition
between two different possible responses to the Basque-Spanish conflict. One is to rise
up, characterized by ETA’s violent uprising against the Spanish State. The alternative is
to rise above, or transcend the gendered political discourses that nourish the violence.
One final example of Medem’s favoring of the second option is his choice to let esteemed
Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga speak the final words of the film. In this final
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monologue, Atxaga plays on the similarity of the Basque words herria (people,
community) and hiria (city) to express his desire that Euskal Herria (the Basque
Country) become Euskal Hiria (the Basque City), or in other words, that it evolve “de un
espacio donde parece haber una identidad primera, original, importante a un espacio
donde haya muchas identidades.” As Atxaga describes his vision for a more open,
cosmopolitan society, overhead images of Basque urban centers fill the screen. Finally,
Atxaga muses that were Basques to achieve the transformation he describes, they would
all levitate twenty centimeters above the ground, thanks to the lifted ideological weight.
This notion of rising up by achieving lightness through openness to change and diversity
departs entirely from ETA’s concept of uprising as a means of returning to an imaginary
original, uncivilized baso state. In my view, this contrast between self-defensive rising up
(levantamiento) and liberating rising above (levitación) must not be overlooked if one is
to fully recognize La pelota vasca’s transgression of the restrictive political discourses
that tend to dominate the nationalist debate.
Medem entered dangerous symbolic terrain when he borrowed from the Basque
nationalist aesthetic tradition to make La pelota vasca, packing his film with
ideologically charged images and sounds. And by eschewing chronological narrative and
refusing to adopt an “objective” perspective, he opened himself up even further to
accusations of moral ambiguity or bias. Medem once admitted that his films aim to
provoke viewers’ emotions first and foremost: “Intento que al espectador le suceda lo
mismo que a mí: que primero se sienta seducido de forma totalmente irracional, que se
sienta atraído emocionalmente por lo que está viendo y que, una vez situado dentro de la
historia en términos emocionales, empiece a pensar y a ver las ideas” (Medem qtd. in
Etxebeste Gómez 48-49). However, as this quote indicates, Medem does not seek that
emotional response gratuitously, but rather hopes for it to open a path to new forms of
perception. In my view, this is the case in La pelota vasca. Although the combination of
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stunning Basque landscapes, strapping male athletes, and moving folk melodies incites
the viewer to initially respond with either irrational delight or irrational disgust,
depending upon her position in the Basque-Spanish divide, a closer examination of
Medem’s reinterpretation of those images and sounds points to a critical reflection that
goes beyond nationalist sentimentalism. Medem risked alienating viewers (and did, in
fact, alienate many of them) by communicating his ideas through the symbolic discourse
of Basque nationalism; however, by interrogating Basque nationalism from within its
own discursive structures, rather than adopting an objectivist, delegitimizing Spanish
nationalist perspective, La pelota vasca transgresses the discourses of both Basque and
Spanish nationalisms, pointing toward alternative approaches to reaching understanding.
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CONCLUSION
In my examination of Jon Juaristi’s and Albert Boadella’s autobiographies and
Julio Medem’s documentary, I have shown how these purportedly “non-nationalist”
authors portray themselves as subverting or transgressing the sub-state nationalisms that
are dominant in their regions. Each of them employs a different metaphor to express what
is by his own account a counter-hegemonic political and artistic position. In Cambio de
destino, Juaristi portrays himself as a ghost in a Basque Country that forbids opposition
to hegemonic nationalist identity. In Memorias de un bufón Boadella likens himself to a
jester, a subversive figure due to his liminal social position and ability to criticize
authority, as a way to portray himself as an independent thinker who never aligns himself
with hegemonic ideologies. And in La pelota vasca Medem adopts the perspective of a
bird soaring over the chasm dividing opposing Basque and Spanish national identities. In
my analysis of Juaristi’s and Boadella’s reconstructions of their journeys toward their
current “non-nationalist” selves, I have called into question the supposedly
“transgressive” nature of their narratives by uncovering discourses that uphold
conservative Spanish nationalism. In contrast, I have argued that Medem’s cinematic
treatment of competing Basque and Spanish nationalisms does present the possibility of
breaking free from the boundaries of the conflict through its reformulation of patriarchal
nationalist symbolism.
One of the overarching themes that has appeared throughout this dissertation is
the claim to or rejection of an objective point of view. It is my view that Juaristi and
Boadella, in their adoption of a rationalist position that delegitimizes their opponents’
arguments by portraying them as irrational or subjective, they fail to transgress the
binaries at the root of nationalist discourse. Instead, their life stories function in the
service of a centralist Spanish nationalist narrative. Medem, by contrast, rejects
pretensions to objectivity, instead inserting a multiplicity of subjective perspectives in La
241
pelota vasca through fragmented editing and blending of fictional and documentary
footage. Related to this is Medem’s appropriation of emotionally charged nationalist
symbolism. The cinematic genre permits Medem to experiment with the affective
component of nationalist audiovisual discourse, striking a chord with viewers while at the
same time developing a subtle criticism of that discourse. The result is a more nuanced
(and ambiguous, hence the controversy it sparked) treatment of a complex political and
identitarian situation than the one offered by the essentialist categories that prevail in
Juaristi’s and Boadella’s autobiographies. As I have explored at length in my analyses of
their individual works, one example of the essentialist binaries upheld by Juaristi and
Boadella relates to gender. While these two authors cling to traditionalist definitions of
masculinity and femininity that impede their arguments from becoming as transgressive
as claim them to be, Medem problematizes gender constructs and reveals their
relationship to antagonistic national identities. Thus, my conclusion is that unlike
Juaristi’s ghost and Boadella’s jester, Medem’s bird, in its interrogation of the ties
between gender norms and exclusionary national identities, offers a vision that
transgresses the exclusionary nationalist conflict.
The field of Hispanic Studies has traditionally lacked robust forms of engagement
with Spain’s non-Castilian languages and cultures.52 This research into the still emergent
areas of Basque and Catalan Studies, by contributing to the discipline’s knowledge of
Spain’s peripheral regions, aims to foment more comprehensive and inclusive study of
the cultures of that diverse country. At the same time, this dissertation seeks to encourage
the comparatively younger fields of Basque Studies and Catalan Studies to take into
greater consideration the Spanish-language cultural production of the Basque Country
and Catalonia, where such production is often excluded from the local literary systems.
52 Joan Ramón Resina traces the history of Hispanism and problematizes its
universalizing ideology in “Whose Hispanism? Cultural Trauma, Disciplined Memory, and
Symbolic Dominance” (2005).
242
My focus on Basque and Catalan intellectuals who do not identify with their regions’
sub-state nationalisms challenges the established view of a bipolar conflict between
Spain’s center and periphery and brings about greater recognition of the complex
ideological diversity that exists within the two peripheral regions. It also aims for a
reevaluation of our understanding of hegemonic power and the subversion of it in the
context of the Spanish State’s relationship with its most politically and culturally
autonomous communities. Finally, this dissertation adds to the scholarship dealing with
Spain’s centralistic and sub-state nationalisms by bringing to light the role that gender
constructs play in nation-building in this particular context.
Although my analysis of Juaristi’s and Boadella’s political and symbolic
discourses has focused primarily on their autobiographical writings, these authors’ bodies
of work also include poetry and novel, in Juaristi’s case, and theater, in Boadella’s case.
An expansion of this dissertation could include further analysis of Juaristi’s poetry and
Boadella’s dramatic works, which, in my opinion, offer a somewhat more nuanced
treatment of the conflicting national identities in Spain’s peripheries than their
autobiographies do, thanks in part to their partial abandonment of rationalist discourse. It
could also examine the cultural production of some of the other purportedly “nonnationalist” public intellectuals from Spain’s peripheries, such as Catalan journalist
Arcadi Espada’s diaries and blogs, Basque novelist Ramón Saizarbitoria’s fiction, and
Basque philosopher Fernando Savater’s autobiography and political essays, which could
lead to further insight into the diversity and polemics that exist within this increasingly
influential group of thinkers.
Public debate on nationalisms in Spain has been dominated for the most part by
male-centered discourse, which tends to obscure the significant role that Basque and
Catalan feminisms have played in the historical development of nationalist movements in
those regions. As I continue exploring the intersection of nationalist discourse and gender
in Spain and its peripheries in my future research, I will turn my gaze toward women-
243
authored cultural production that deals with these issues, such as Catalan filmmaker Isona
Passola’s 2009 documentary film Cataluña-Espanya, which explores the conflict
between Catalan and Spanish nationalisms and was conceived of in response to Medem’s
La pelota vasca. I am interested specifically in examining feminism’s ambivalent
relationship with nationalist political movements, as well as the ways in which the
complex ties between feminist and nationalist identities differ in the Basque, Catalan, and
Spanish contexts.
In the future I would also like to expand the geographical scope of this research
with, for example, a more detailed analysis of how the issues at the center of this
dissertation play out in the Galician context. A broader scope could also entail a
consideration of those culturally distinct autonomous communities, like Andalucía, which
do not enjoy the “historical nationality” status, or the autonomous cities of Ceuta and
Melilla, which occupy a uniquely liminal position within the Spanish nation. Finally, the
issue of competing nationalisms in contemporary Spain is being increasingly shaped by
its growing immigrant communities, whose presence challenges exclusionary collective
identities. I look forward to evaluating how these demographic changes, especially in
Catalonia and the Basque Country, are already affecting cultural institutions and
nationalist discourse.
244
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