Postscriptum

Postscriptum In 1937, deployed by the Republic, a young Spanish sailor painted a self-portrait upon arrival at the military port of Cartagena. He dated it and wrote underneath: “When I arrived, after 37 hours of travel to cover 300 kilometers ...the fires caused by the aerial bombardment kept burning. All my thoughts went out to you.” During the duration of the Spanish Civil War, this port city in the southeast of Spain, where the Republic’s supplies of military material arrived, was the scene of terrible bombings and armed con- flicts. This first drawing, however, could not foresee either the development or unfolding of future events. It merely refers to a moment of separation and distancing, to the dra- matic circumstances that came between this soldier and his wife and newborn daughter. A full-body portrait with the soldier standing, campaign bedroll in one hand, the drawing depicts a truncated life that is expressed and materialized in a simultaneously pictorial and narrative fashion. During the ensuing years, the same soldier again channeled his experience of the conflict into images. Through his set of illustrations run pain, sorrow, indignation, madness, hunger, love, misery, the absurdity of the military commands, unjustified violence, fear, death, the helplessness of the children that, like dogs, wan- dered through the streets of Cartagena. In May 1939 he made one of the last of the series. And he wrote again: “The day was breaking ...The hours of waiting and of cold had numbed us. Anxious to arrive again, to find ourselves, to daydream. In a scrap of a sailor’s blanket, wrapped up and sleeping in that rough dawn, lay the hope and fear of our existence” (see Figure 45). It was not, however, the last of the drawings. The next two depicted beggars and starving children watching the military victory parades of Franco’s triumphant troops. During the time that the Civil War lasted, life was reflected in images that, at the same time, also served to bestow meaning on the experience. Transit through this simultaneously real and imaginary space of the armed conflict, where already no one is nor will ever be again who they once were, made use of ritualized forms and cultural schemas. This young Spaniard’s drawings share aesthetic features with Republican murals and pro- paganda posters. Sometimes, especially in the depiction of women, the lines recall the stylized bodies of Rafael de Penagos, then professor of Drawing in the Workers’ Institute (Instituto Obrero) in Valencia. But the drawings’ value does not depend so much on their artistic quality as on their will and determination to construct a narrative: to make a story that could at the same time serve as fuel for memory. The form of withstanding harm depends on this desire for interpretation that constitutes, in its way, an encoded language. Above the will to live rises the will to order the heterogeneous elements of experience such that the unconnected, the illogical, and the disproportionate acquire the meaningful characteristics of a narrative. Although they are not a military chronicle or a political history, these images rescued from oblivion offer up the experience in the form of its temporal delimitation and its collective meaning. In their way, they reflect the tension between the flow of life and the need to endow this very flow with order, stability, and coherence; they pursue the same thing as always: to bestow meaning upon experience. The drawings, which remained hidden during the post-war period, were dusted off in the later years of softened Francoism. Around 1960, their author painted his portrait for the last time; alone again, although not now numb with cold, but daydreaming in 214 Postscriptum 215 the shadows of his living room. On this last image he wrote: “The years have passed, but sometimes, when the memories of those days rise up crushed together, we ask ourselves if we have become again the same ones as that yesterday.” His work, which has never been published, has no commercial or political value, but it does represent an example of to what extent culture is, as Nietzsche said, the body’s symptom, and how experience is materialized, as Dilthey suggests, in legal, literary, scientific, or artistic forms. The 40 or so images that make up the series share the narrative structure of the experience of harm that we have seen throughout the pages of this book. Here too the protago- nists wander through imaginary places and impossible spaces. Rupture, separation, and reconciliation meet one another in this form of living and understanding the war. The experience of pain melds with danger or uncertainty. Through their rhetorical and argumentative resources, the pencil and the sanguine explore the public and the private, the body and the soul, one’s own pain, the pain of others, physical anguish, and moral suffering. Throughout the pages of this book, human beings have become present in the half- light. Whether they were virgin martyrs, soldiers in field hospitals, or anesthetized patients, we have seen them wander down the path of shadows and through interme- diate spaces. For Don Quixote and the Spanish nuns, the experience of harm took place in a semi-public or semi-private space, in a strange place constructed in the cloisters of convents or on the paths of La Mancha. We ourselves, heirs to the modern culture of the impartial spectator, also inhabit borderlands. Our impartial judgment on world events depends on that middle distance that permits the logic of taste as well as political agreement. Accustomed to sleeping in strangers’ beds, we also bear inscribed on our foreheads the indelible mark of liminality, or in a more roundabout fashion, the mark of mediocrity. Within the framework of the clinical practices that we examined in Chapters 4 and 5, there was a great deal of pain, but neither the semiotics of harm, worried by the universality of expressive signs, nor clinical medicine, interested in illness’ inscriptions on the bodily geography, vindicated the patient’s expression as anything more than an instrument of knowledge; that is, as a means to an end. On the contrary, the sick person always was, as the French historian Michel Foucault wrote so correctly, “between paren- theses.” This is why the history of pain has been confused on occasions with the history of the progressive liberalization of mechanical models of hospital care. From the perspec- tive of rhetorical forms, however, the sciences and arts constitute nothing more than two different materializations of experience. Cultural history may pursue the emotions in diaries and autobiographies, but it cannot lose sight of the location of these narrative means within other argumentative topics. The correspondent from Berlin who fantasized about submission as a form of sexual arousal found nothing but suffering and misfor- tune. His public (and false) life was left on one side and his private (and true) existence on the other. He was trapped in the middle. The pain of many of the nervous and mental patients of the nineteenth century shows a similar paradox, although in this case not referring to narrative forms, but the rhetoric of conviction. The suffering of many soldiers wounded by bullets in peripheral nerves was, for a long time, only mental whereas that of many of the terminally ill was, until recently, curiously invisible. There resides part of the character of harmful experience that is at the same time paradoxical and resistant. The history of its clinical conceptualization, of its juridical formation, or its artistic material- ization does not permit a progressive reading, but a sinuous history of broadening and narrowing of social awareness. Because history is written for the living and not for the dead, only from the present can the history of pain vindicate as its own the indifferent gestures of the virgin martyrs, the laughter and the mockery that accompanied the misadventures of Spain’s most modern 216 Postscriptum character, Don Quixote, or the penitence that took place, in hiding, inside of convents. At the same time, because history is written from the present and not from the past, it is possible to investigate the cultural materializations of past experience, not as a form of valorizing or constructing a memory, but as an intellectual exercise, and also a moral and political one, that allows us to search in history for the crystallizations of the flow of life, whether as a scientific theory, a penal code, a work of art, or the note- book with which a sailor of the Spanish Republic tried to order his experience of pain and war. Notes Acknowledgements 1. This research has been carried out with the assistance of the projects MICINN FFI2010- 20876: “Epistemología histórica: Historia de las emociones en los siglos XIX y XX,” as well as HUM2007-63267: “Epistemología Histórica. Estilos de razonamiento científico y modelos culturales en el Mundo Moderno: El dolor y la Guerra.” Introduction 1. “That is why it is more fitting to judge the quality of a man when he is in doubt and danger, and to observe his manner in adversity, for then at last an honest cry is wrung from the bottom of his heart, the mask of iron is torn off, and the truth stands exposed.” (Lucretius, De rerum natura, book III) Adapted from Lucretius, On The Nature Of Things, translated by Cyril Bailey. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1910, Book III. 2. See Peter Burke, “Is there a cultural history of emotions?” in Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills (eds), Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine, London, Ashgate, 2005, p.

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