How Myths are Made – Book Review
Aurelio Ramos Cabellero, ‘The Spanish Civil War in Contemporary Spanish Fiction: Soldados de Salamina, Los Girasoles Ciegos, and La Mula’ (unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Birmingham, 2009) – Book Review
‘Each author creates meaning in a unique way’. So concludes the author of this thesis, drawing together two themes (the creation of meaning and the unique/particular/individual) that run throughout his analysis of three recent works of fiction relating to the Spanish Civil War.
On the subject of meaning and its creation, this thesis shows a great deal of sensitivity to the processes, and in particular the literary techniques, by which history and other stories are constructed.
With relation to ‘the individual and the particular’ (as the author phrases it in one plance), these three works are shown to focus their attention on the effects of the war in one location, or one moment in time. This is the case, for example, with the single incident investigated by the narrator/protagonist of Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas. This character shares his name with the author of the novel, without necessarily being the same person – as is rightly pointed out in this thesis.
The upshot of this is that the reader’s understanding of the Civil War becomes nuanced. Things that may once have seemed certain no longer are. The Republicans are no longer totally good. The Right is no longer totally wrong. There are good and bad people on both sides, their humanity redeemed and gently mocked at the same time. Meanwhile the horrors of war in general are exposed. The authors of these three texts are sceptical of totalising narratives.
Paradoxically, these authors create new myths even as they deconstruct others. Tentatively and self-consciously, the author of Soldados de Salamina gives us a new hero figure. Yet his very reluctance to do so is itself an effective narrative technique. There is no way out of this trap.
In the works discussed, as in Ramos Caballero’s analysis of them (in which he quotes Ricoeur to good effect – see blog entry for 26 January 2010), the boundaries between history and fiction begin to blur. We are firmly in the realm of critiques of narrative such as Mark Day also offers.
Filed under Books, Europe, Narrative | Comment (0)Passivity and violence – Film Review
Il Conformista (Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/Federal Republic of Germany, 1970)
Chameleon-like, Marcello Clerici (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) bends, shifts, and changes to comply with the will of whoever he is with at the time: whether it be his fiancée, his mother, members of the Fascist movement, or even – through a flashback – the man who once tried to seduce him when he was a boy…
Unable to resolve the tensions created by his weakness, Clerici resorts to violence. Or rather, he relies on the violence of other people whom he passively watches as they act on his behalf. Thus he shoots the would-be pederast in his flashback, asks a fellow Fascist activist to deal with the problem of his mother’s lover, and watches as his old philosophy teacher Professor Quadri (the man whom Clerici himself had been sent to eliminate) is ambushed and shot, along with Anna Quadri, for whom Clerici had begun to develop feelings.
We find ourselves confronted with a passive hero, whose only solution is to his own problems is to call upon the violence of others. See Shakespeare’s Hamlet or the novel Endlich Stille for similarly violent passive heroes, and 1979 for one whose violence is turned inwards. on himself
Bertolucci’s screenplay is based on the 1951 novel The Conformist by Alberto Moravia. The film was shown at BFI Southbank on 13 February 2010.
Filed under Europe, Film, German | Comment (0)