Joan Sales and Incerta Glòria the Polyphonies of a Roman-Fleuve
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
111 II Xavier Pla Joan Sales and Incerta glòria The polyphonies of a roman-fleuve In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, contemporary Catalan literature in general and the novel in particular broke radically with the existing narrative tradition. Then came an inevitable step back, which led writers to reappropriate mainly the realist and comedy of manners currents of the second half of the 19th century. Over the long, slow and limited return In 1956 the publication of the novel to the novel, the subject of the Spanish Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) by Joan Civil War was one of the last to be tackled Sales marked the beginning of the end by creators. A perfectly understandable of that long silence. It is now almost a silence about the conflict as a whole commonplace to say that Incerta glòria reigned: first of all, it could only be is the first Catalan novel which presents spoken of from the winners’ point of the Civil War from the losers’ point of view, and when they began to do so view and, moreover, tries to convey to the their novels were written in Spanish. reader the deep, inherent complexity of And so, at least for the first fifteen years the suffering inflicted on its characters of the Franco dictatorship, death, the by three years of war. It is undoubtedly fighting on the front or in the trenches, a novel about the Civil War which has the resistance, the jails, the concentration high ambitions and is controversial at camps or the executions of the losers the same time. Sales describes the war in made very rare appearances in the novels its full complexity, avoids any simplistic published in Catalonia. The situation division into good and bad, all from a of the novelists in exile was different: Catalan nationalist, Republican but also they could reflect a world which had no catholic perspective, and denounces both voice inside Catalonia, a world which fascism and anarchism, both blacks and consequently could hardly be recognised, reds, with virulence. recreated and thus reappropriated and That is no doubt why, when the novel reinterpreted by Catalan society. was first published in Catalonia the 112/113 II Joan Sales and Incerta glòria Xavier Pla indifference or silent indignation of and novelist Rafael Tasis stated so rightly some and the rancour or open hostility of in July 1938: others met a decidedly awkward “A novel has to be thought and constructed work with respectful silence. with time and rest. The best novels about When we examine the different war, like the most sensational ones published about the 1914-1918 war, were written a few options available to Catalan writers years later, once the embers of the combat had and intellectuals during the Civil War, burned out. It was then that experience and we often forget to mention the delicate maturity brought their magnificent harvest. position the people who were both It was then that we could have a true Republicans and Catalan nationalists war literature”. must have found themselves in when they had to stand firm against Franco’s The enormous symbolic potential troops. Not only that: while remaining Incerta glòria is a catholic novel, although catholics, they found themselves at the it has often been quoted as one of the heart of a moral conflict of the greatest ways Existentialism was introduced into importance to their own personal, contemporary Catalan literature. Through ideological and even aesthetic evolution. the lives of four characters (a Republican soldier on the Aragón front, a Barcelona We can only count a small number anarchist converted to catholicism, of active participants in the war who a young priest obviously influenced managed to extract a work, a definitive by Sartre, and Juli Soleràs, eccentric novel, from it immediately after it was and wild, one of the most fascinating over. That may have been because of characters in contemporary Catalan the excessive closeness of their tragic literature), the four parts (including El experiences or their literary immaturity vent de la nit, The Night Wind) of this or, naturally, their radical and sometimes novel provide an exceptional testimony. dogmatic party spirit. That testimony is endowed with The same does not hold for the foreign enormous symbolic potential about novelists “devoted to the last great the war and the moral evolution of the cause”. Most of them published their characters who, sunk in a deep moral most important works during the war crisis, face youth, loneliness and their or shortly afterwards, mostly novels destiny with tenacity. Moreover, the supporting the republican side: we may different threads of the narrative make recall Georges Bernanos’ Les grands up a great classical novel about love and cimetières sous la lune, which appeared war, with three men in love with the in 1937, André Malraux’s L’Espoir and same woman, about youth and maturity, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia about war and revolution. Not forgetting in 1938, or Ernest Hemingway’s For one of the most intense memento mori Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. in Catalan literature about the death However it turns out, a civil war leaves of President Lluís Companys, arrested a wound which is so deep, so lacerating, by the Gestapo in France, deported to that it certainly prevents those involved Spain and executed by Franco’s army at in it, at least for a time, from facing the Montjuïc Castle in Barcelona. difficulties inherent to any fictional or The author, Joan Sales i Vallès, who was novelistic reaction. That is what the critic born in Barcelona in 1912 and died in 113 II 1983, belonged to one of the generations society between the wars, and tried that lived the years of the Spanish to find a framework for its members’ Republic, and most of all the outbreak concerns about the metaphysical and progress of the Civil War, most dimensions of existence. intensely. He took an active part because Joan Sales was above all an independent of his age and ended up devoting his man, an outsider of Catalan literature, entire youth to it. Moreover, as a member certainly less self-taught than he of the losing side, like other authors of pretended, a creator who never “married” that generation he had to be constantly anyone and whom we might define as justifying himself to History. an action writer who, since his youth, Sales, who had a degree in law but never had manufactured his own image as an practised, started work at the age of intellectual we might call a “militant”. 15 as editor of the newspaper La Nau. The militant writer, the soldier writer, After working sporadically as corrector placed himself at the service of a and typesetter he was one of the first cause; he was the “combatant”. Catalan teachers for the Republican A militant of Catalan nationalism, Catalan government. While he was still Republicanism and catholicism, Sales very young, under the Primo de Rivera always felt a need to explain everything, dictatorship, he was a member of the to explain himself and justify himself first and clandestine Catalan Communist ceaselessly, whether in prologues, Party, founded in 1928 by Jordi Arquer, epilogues or footnotes, as if he wanted which tried to combine communism to preserve his long life experience from and nationalism. After the outbreak of oblivion or confusion. A friend and the war he ended up turning towards editor of Màrius Torres1, an associate of catholicism and quickly and definitively Joan Coromines2, publisher of Llorenç distanced himself from the communist Villalonga and Mercè Rodoreda, director and anarchist world. of the publishing house El Club dels We can place Sales’ evolution parallel Novel·listes, Sales was first and foremost to, though distant from, that of the a great reader. He was first excited by young intellectuals who were close to Stendhal’s work, and then definitively the catholic and independent Catalan by the novels of Dostoyevsky (he newspaper El Matí, founded in 1929 by translated The Brothers Karamazov), a group led by Josep M. Capedevila, who and the literature of the great French tried to confirm Christian positions in catholic writers and philosophers such Catalonia intellectually. Incidentally, he as François Mauriac (he translated never met them or worked with them. Thérèse Desqueyroux), Georges Bernanos, That group of writers, among whom we Emmanuel Mounier, Gabriel Marcel or might mention Pau Romeva, Maurici Teilhard de Chardin. Serrahima or Ramon Esquerra, much influenced by French catholicism, called into question the values of Christianity amid the ideological tensions of European ■ 1 Màrius Torres (1910-1942), poet. 2 Joan Coromines (1905-1997), philologist, author of the dictionary known as the Coromines. 114/115 II Joan Sales and Incerta glòria Xavier Pla The fraught history of a novel that, while concealing the source: the title At the outbreak of the Civil War, Sales is taken from some verses at the end of entered the Catalan government War Act I Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Two School to acquire the necessary military Gentlemen of Verona, which he had found training to take part in the fighting as an quoted in chapter XVII of Le rouge officer. At the end of 1936 he joined the et le noir by Stendhal: Durruti column in Madrid and it was in “O, how this spring of love resembleth Xàtiva where he continued his military The uncertain glory of an April day, training (April 1937). Later, he was on Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, the Aragón front (May 1937-March 1938) And by and by a cloud takes all away!” and lastly on the Catalan front, in the Incerta glòria was published in 1956, Macià-Companys columns (April-June despite difficulties of every kind and 1938).