Language, Culture, and Nationality: the Case of Jordi Soler Mryellen Bieder
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You are accessing the Digital Archive of the Esteu accedint a l'Arxiu Digital del Catalan Catalan Review Journal. Review By accessing and/or using this Digital A l’ accedir i / o utilitzar aquest Arxiu Digital, Archive, you accept and agree to abide by vostè accepta i es compromet a complir els the Terms and Conditions of Use available at termes i condicions d'ús disponibles a http://www.nacs- http://www.nacs- catalanstudies.org/catalan_review.html catalanstudies.org/catalan_review.html Catalan Review is the premier international Catalan Review és la primera revista scholarly journal devoted to all aspects of internacional dedicada a tots els aspectes de la Catalan culture. By Catalan culture is cultura catalana. Per la cultura catalana s'entén understood all manifestations of intellectual totes les manifestacions de la vida intel lectual i and artistic life produced in the Catalan artística produïda en llengua catalana o en les language or in the geographical areas where zones geogràfiques on es parla català. Catalan Catalan is spoken. Catalan Review has been Review es publica des de 1986. in publication since 1986. Language, Culture, and Nationality: The case of Jordi Soler Mryellen Bieder Catalan Review, Vol. XXI, (2007), p. 381 -394 LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND NATIONALITY: THE CASE OF JORDI SOLER MARYELLEN BIEDER nd SOLER, Jordi. Los rojos de ultra mar. 2004. 2 ed. Madrid: Santillana, 2005. 237 pp. SOLER, Jordi. La última hora del última día. Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2007. 219 pp. Catalan literature's status as Guest of Honor at the 2007 Fira de Frankfurt, dubbed a "macroencuentro" by the press (Barranco), brought to the forefront of national debate the conflictive responses linking the Catalan language with Catalan identity. Leaving aside the politically charged relationship between language and state, the polemic boils down to acore question: is language the primary marker of cultural identity or can a culture find legitimate expression in more than one language? At the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, Catalan culture, through its representative body, the Ramon Llull Institute, chose to present one answer, although it simultaneously appropriated the voices of Barcelona-born Castilian-Ianguage authors, among them Juan Goytisolo and Eduardo Mendoza, and Madrid-born Jorge Semprún, who publishes predominantly in French. Commenting in El País on the Frankfurt Fair, Xavier Vidal-Folch reminded his readers of an axiom echoed repeatedly in Frankfurt: "el mundo literario catalan (ya no el, mas amplio, cultural) es sólo el escrito en lengua catalana." While Vidal-Folch attributes the dominance of this "convención mayoritariamente asumida" to the practices of the academic world, Mario Santana, among others, has convincingly challenged the assumption in a breakthrough 2000 article on "national literatures." Vidal-Folch, acknowledging the falsity of the "pretendida pureza de sangre lingüística de esta cultura," affirms instead Catalan culture's "caracter mestizo y plural." Two recent novels by the Mexican-born author, Jordi Soler, confront, both directly and indirectly, issues of language, culture, nationality, and historical memory that circulated widely in response to Catalonia's prominence in Frankfurt. The first, Los rojos de ultramar (2004), marks his initial contribution to the "memory boom" oE recent fiction and films that memorialize the civil war (Labanyi 106). The novel fires its opening salvo in the "memory war," to adopt Jo Labanyi's insightful shorthand for the conflicting versions of historical memory of the Spanish Civil War (97), when the narrator, a professor of MARYELLEN BIEDER anthropology from the Universidad Nacional de México, addresses a class at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Astounded to discover that Spain's pacto de silencio has produced a generation of students who have no memory of or interest in Spain's past, he reacts as the grandson of a Republican soldier: "sintiéndome un poco ofendido de que el exilio republicano hubiera sido extirpado de la historia oficial de España" (Los rojos de ultramar 16).' When he surveys the beach at Argelès-sur-Mer that once housed the vast concentration camp imprisoning Republican exiles, he reformulates this unwelcome insight: "en esa playa y en aquella aula había la misma voluntad de olvidar ese pasado oscuro y, en realidad, nada remoto" (183). The narrative is his answer to the revelation that "apenas queda memoria de la guerra" (234) in Spain, or in France, as a result of "el acuerdo colectÍvo de olvidar" (235). In contrast to the Spanish students, for Soler's narrator growing up in Mexico the war was a constant, if unspoken, presence in his life that, as he is aware, shapes his worldview: "La manera en que esa condición omnipresente de haber heredado una guerra perdida había interferido en nuestra forma de mirar el mundo" (175). The novel charts his attempt to recover the history of grandfather Arcadi from Republican soldier to Mexican exile to successful businessman to self-exiled hermit. In the process he seeks to understand the grip Catalan language and culture held on his grandfather throughout his life in Mexico and the pull it continues to exert on him. Completed after his grandfather's death, the narrative is an act of "postmemory," as Marianne Hirsch defines the term with reference to the Holocaust, that is, "the effort to maintain the visceral, affective, and ethical response" to IVstory "in the face of the loss of the primary bearers of memory" (20). In a recent article on film and fiction that treat the Spanish Civil War, Labanyi draws avaluable distinctÏon between those novels that employ the "trope of haunting" and those that take a "documentary stance" to attain "maximum verisimilitude" (97, lO3). I will argue that Soler's two latest novels, while adding a new dimension to the current memory boom, incorporate features of both groups without falling fully within either. The lives of Jordi Soler and his unnamed narrator(s) contradict Quim Monzó's pertinent observation that "mucha gente tiene del mundo una idea hec ha a partir de la geometría actual del poder político-cultural." At a roundtable discussion infelicitously entitled "Iberoamérica: ¿local, global o glocal?" at the VivAmérica Festival in Madrid in October 2007, Soler contested being pigeonholed by his early publishers as a "Latin Arnerican author," considering the label too "'. I All quotations from Soler's novels are taken from Los rojos de ultramar, unless otherwise indicated. LANGUAGE. CULTURE. AND NATIONALITY: THE CASE OF JORDI SOLER 383 restrictive. The author blurb for both novels locates his birthplace, which is also that of his narrator/protagonist, as the Mexican outpost of La Portuguesa, "una extraña comunidad de blancos que hablaban catalan en medio de una selva que había sido territorio indígena desde hada milenios" (I94). The name of the community, La Portuguesa, once that of astore established by an early Portuguese settler, constitutes a constant reminder throughout the two novels of the persistence of cultural identity across national spaces; it thereby doubly underscores the Catalan refugees' cultural and linguistic separateness. Founded in I946 by Arcadi and four other Catalan Republican exiles as a coffee plantation hacked from the surrounding jungle, La Portuguesa survives as a multi-generational, Catalan-speaking enclave which, thanks to the Catalans' entrepreneurial spirit and cultural affinity for work, becomes a financi al success, further setting the refugees apart from their neighbors within this multi-cultural, multi-lingual world.2 In the "premodernidad" of the selva (55), the Catalans instaU not only a modern community in miniature but their replica of middle-class Barcelona. In his review of Soler's second novel which expands upon life in La Portuguesa, La última tarde del última día (2007), Joaquín Marco correctly calls attention to the author's "falso autobiogra fismo," his tendency to represent his imagined fictional world as his personal history. Soler, throughout his interview with Ima Sanchís in La Vanguardia, and elsewhere, responds as though he and the narrat or of La última hora del última día were indistinguishable, thus conf1ating novel and autobiography. From the founding of the coffee plantation, the defining characteristic of La Portuguesa is the Catalan identity of its inhabitants manifest in the Catalan language cojoined to classic icons of Catalan culture: its food, its f1ag and its football allegiance to Barça. The two novels narrat e the tension between colonizers-Catalans following in the footsteps of Hernan Cortés and successive waves of Spaniards and other European immigrants-and colonized in terms of cultural clichés: "el ritmo trepidante de los cinco catalanes" set against "el compas relajado con que se trabaja en el trópico" (I93). At different points in both works the underlying cultural conf1ict provokes a reversal of the polarity of the powerful and the powerless.3 Soler assigns the five plantation owners varying degrees of the contrasting threads l The name Arcadi literalizes the arcadian nature of the exiles' enterprise, whether or not it is an example of authorial poetic license. l In interviews, Soler stresses the second-class, if not third-class, status of his grand father and the other founders of La Portuguesa who had to make their own way in Mexico without the attention and support received by prominent intellectuals, artists, and high ranking military officers in exiIe in the same country (DeMicheli, Pérez Andújar, etc.).