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Xos Luis Mndez Ferrn and the Novel


of Revolution
Jos Mara Rodrguez Garca

Spanish and Latin American Studies , Duke University


Published online: 05 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Jos Mara Rodrguez Garca (2013) Xos Luis Mndez Ferrn and the Novel of
Revolution, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 24:1, 22-47, DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2013.754235
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Literature Interpretation Theory, 24:2247, 2013


Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1043-6928 print/1545-5866 online
DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2013.754235

Xos Luis Mndez Ferrn


and the Novel of Revolution

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JOS MARA RODRGUEZ GARCA

XOS LUIS MNDEZ FERRN IN CONTEXT:


FROM POLITICS TO LITERATURE AND BACK
Born in the provincial capital of Ourense in 1938, X.L. Mndez Ferrn (this
is how he signs his works) is one of Galicias greatest living prose writers and
the author of a series of political novels that gradually eschewed the conventions of realism. The first of these novels was Retorno a Tagen Ata, written
in prison in 1970 and published the following year. Retorno is anachronistically set in the 1960s, during the slow decline of literary socio-realism and
the overlapping vogue of the fantastic mode, which among Galician-born
authors was informed by the transculturation of philo-Celtic myths and the
rewriting of chivalric stories of Breton inspiration. Ferrns novella implements a timidly experimental aesthetic by comparison with the late-modernist
Spanish-language works of the same decade. Certain techniques of the
female Bildungsroman and the medieval quest romance are incorporated
into the books main plot, which deals with the preparatory stages leading
up to an armed insurgency in Tagen Ataa fictive counterpart to Galicia,
one of Spains historic sub-state nations with an autochthonous romance
language different from Castilian.
Tagen Atas various radicalized groups (landless peasants, nationalist
intellectuals, factory workers) are summoned to join their heterogeneous
forces to break away from an authoritarian state, Terra Ancha. The latter
implicitly stands for Francos Castilian-centric Spain although it may also represent any strongly bureaucratized state which does not recognize a plurality
of discrete nations within itself. Writing in 1970, Ferrn strategically treats
Terra Ancha as if it were a democracy, although Spain did not have a free
general election until June 1977, two months after the Communist Party was
legalized. This deliberate discrepancy underlines the idea that the advent of
a liberal-democratic state will not solve Spains long-standing problem of
Jos Mara Rodrguez Garca is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies
at Duke University.
22

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Ferrn and the Novel of Revolution

23

how and to what extent the autochthonous rights and self-differentiating


institutions of its three historic nations (Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque
Provinces) should be restored.
An academically trained philologist and medievalist with a primary specialty in French and Galician literature, Ferrn soon became aware that his
national allegoriesspecifically the Tagen Ata narrative cycle published
between 1971 and 1987, to which the equally symbolic Arrabaldo do Norte
(1964) must be added as a transitional workwere doomed to be deconstructed in skeptical readings informed by poststructuralist and postmodern
critique (Lpez Sndez 7879). Nonetheless, this awareness did not discourage him from attempting an ambiguously open-ended grand rcit or master
narrativea Bakhtinian dialogic fiction, to be preciseas redemptionist
Marxist ideologies came into crisis. In fact, it propelled him to devise simultaneously distancing and mimetic narrative strategies. Thus, although Retorno
a Tagen Ata features a single narratorthe young female protagonistit
plays out the identity crises implicit in the political conversions and deconversions experienced by large segments of Spains and Galicias populations in the early seventies as the collective awareness of democracys imminent advent became stronger and political orthodoxies were accordingly
relaxed. The novella also includes digressions and footnotes dealing with the
presumed ancient traditions and institutions of its three principal fictive
enclaves (Anat, Tagen Ata, and Terra Ancha), and ultimately exposes the
protagonist-narrator and her main antagonist as unreliable interpreters of
their small nations present.
The later novel, Bretaa, Esmeraldina (1987), problematizes further the
epistemological claims of political narratives by exponentially complicating
its plot: it uses a first-person narrator in conversation with multiple alter egos
and interlocutors (the main one being Esmeraldina, the addressee repeatedly
apostrophized in the text) as well as countless localities and resonant timeframes. The use of these devices highlights the protagonist-narrators traumatic memory disorder, which itself has become a chronic condition. Ferrns
large repertoire of ironic narrative structures and literary games turns la
matire de Tagen Ata (as I will be calling his philo-Breton cycle of political
novels that foreground Arthurian motifs) into a mythic creation comparable
in complexity and ambiguity to Juan Benets better-known Regin cycle. It
too challenges the reader to assume multiple subject-positions of critique
and self-critique without resolving those contradictions into what Mikhail
Bakhtin calls a monologic discourse.
Retorno launches a new novel of political revolution whose main feature is that it focuses on hypothetical events which may or may not happen
in Spains future while showing little regard for both chronological linearity
and realistic decorum. It thus questions the sanitized plot of the conventional
master narrative of revolution. To be sure, Ferrns Retorno gestures in the
direction of the historiographic metafiction that revolutioned the novel in

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

Europe in the 1970s (the hemispheric Americas experienced this frenzy


slightly earlier). However, it shuns the related postmodernist gesture of
debunking the storys totalizing claims by means of pastiche, parody, and
systematic fragmentariness, as seen in other contemporary Spanish-language
novels of which Gonzalo Torrente Ballesters Fragmentos de Apocalipsis
(1977) is a classic example. In Torrentes postmodernist narrative project, the
fictionalizing of events from Galicias remote past and the use of extended
anachronisms blur the boundaries between the truncated promise of a politically engaged fiction (one of the main characters in Fragmentos is a nave
anarchist militant) and its sliding into escapist metafiction. Like Torrente,
Ferrn treats history and fiction as competing cultural sign systems.
Nevertheless, in his case (unlike Torrentes) neither system is stripped of its
legitimate claims to meaning-making. Although each realm of textual meaning is relativized, neither one is disabled through the superimposition on it
of a metafictional construct whose outcome would entail the triumph of an
authorial consciousness that ultimately diauthorizes the productive rapport
between text-bound world and historical world.
Also in Bakhtinian fashion, Ferrns political novels borrow chronotopes
and conventions from earlier traditions and appropriate subcultures and
idiolects from the fringes of society. In his matire de Tagen Ata the event of
the revolution is brought about by the combined impetus of enfranchised
constituencies and marginalized groups, whose otherwise contradictory
class interests are temporarily reconciled through their collective dialectizing
of the same oppresive power. My overall argument can therefore be stated
in the form of a chiasmus: Ferrns novel of revolution implies a revolution
in the novel and vice versa.
Nearly all of Ferrns fiction posits as a fundamental horizon of interpretation the history, the present conditions, and the possible futures of the
Iberian Peninsulas northwestern sub-state nationGaliciaand is written in
the indigenous language. Although the Galician vernacular boasts a rich history whose first literary landmark is the cantigas de amigoa large corpus
of thirteenth-century female-voiced love lyricsit only began to approximate co-official status in Galicia in 1981. The Constitution of 1978 still
declares Castilian as the only language that all Spaniards have the duty to
know [todos los espaoles tienen el deber de conocer] (Art. 3.1). For many
centuries, Galician coexisted with Castilian in a situation of diglossia, often
being banned from public life. Ferrn has been nominated for the Nobel
Prize in literature in 1999 and 2008, and was elected President of the Real
Academia Galega (a bastion of moderate nationalist sentiment) in January
2010.
This is not to say that he is a unanimously acclaimed writer in his native
Galicia, let alone in Spain. Numerous critics and reviewers have carefully
singled out for praise the authors virtuoso novellas and stories which are
cast in the fantastic mode yet seem devoid of a political plot. Within the same

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breath, these very critics have generally dismissed his politically engaged
output as a failed attempt at writing the great Galician novel. The present
essay takes the opposite view: as a novelist, Ferrn is at his best when he is
most anti-systemic because paradoxical time-frames are congenial to such
performative speech acts as prophecies and utopias and to the mode of historiographic metafiction. In fact, he has long envisioned his novels as the
implementation of a narrative state of exception to the rules of literary mimesis and political conformity.
Ferrn was too young to have been able to oppose in 1950 the dissolution of the Partido Galeguista by Ramn Pieiro (19151990), a subdued
nacionalista who experienced imprisonment in the 1940s; evolved into an
autonomist regionalist who shunned all forms of radicalism in the ensuing
decade; and succeeded in creating opportunities for fellow philologists to
craft a high-brow literary register of the Galician vernacular under General
Francos otherwise Castilian-monolingual regime. Ferrn was old enough,
however, to be expelled from the general assembly of various allied groups
of nationalist youththe Consello da Mocedadea few months after its creation in 1963 at the instigation of Pieiro and his infiltrated informers, who
did not want a revolutionary-Marxist party to prosper in Galicia.1 The young
radical soon fell under the influence of the global movement in favor of
national emancipation that swept Europe and the world in the late 1950s and
which resulted in the revolutions of Cuba, Vietnam, and Algeria, among
other locations. He thus became converted to a brand of radical galeguismo
or Galician nationalist sentiment that sought to merge with Leninist Marxism
in what one may call a willed common destiny, namely, the joint effort displayed by otherwise very disparate groups to emancipate themselves from a
central state power that they all have construed as illegitimate.2 These diverse
constituencies may forge a coalition of differential interests organized strategically on the basis of their equivalential interchangeability. The rhetoric of
equivalences allows for the previously irreducible idiosyncrasies shown by
two or more self-differentiated groups to be ironed out temporarily so that
these groups may join forces in fighting a common oppressor.
The process I have just described informs Ferrns political novels. The
theory of revolution put forth by Claude Lefort in La question de la
Rvolution (1976) (collected in LInvention dmocratique [1981]) addresses
the same problematic, albeit from a different angle. For Lefort, successful
political uprisings are the outcome of strands of thought that somehow
become intertwined in a common, stronger thread of discontent followed by
a series of concerted efforts at overthrowing the oppressive regime in power.
It is the spectacle of diversity [le spectacle de la diversit] that keeps a
plural revolution [une rvolution plurielle] spreading in the early stages of
mobilization (Lefort 18889). Scholars of the novel may rightly be intrigued
by the similarity between this narrative of revolution and Bakhtins revolutionary concept of narrative dialogism. Just as heteroglot fictions feed off of

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

a hybrid array of subcultures, idiolects, and various overlapping historical


formations whose emerging vectors of domination have not yet been institutionalized, so may prophetic utterances and revolutionary actions channel
the impulses of polyvocal dissent into a cohesive course of action striving
consolidate itself. In both cases, this plots aim would be to replace the perceived living conditions of the present with a new representation of the
world.
When understood as a mass uprising that brings together diverse demonstrations of discontent into a common front, the revolution qua event can
be treated as a form of political action that can easily appropriate heterogeneous platforms and varieties of either active militancy or passive resistance
to an established power. The reason for this flexible status is that revolutionary processes have the ability to renew themselves quickly as one emerging
faction debunks a declining one, as happened with the Bolsheviks rapid
overshadowing of the Mensheviks in Russia in 1917. Alternatively, seemingly
cooperating factions may emerge as a Trojan horse or fifth column, as happened at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with the indiscipline encouraged by the rebellious, anti-systemic anarchists and by Francisco Largo
Caballeros socialists within the large left-wing coalition that came to power
democratically in 1936.3
Similarly, the dialogic novel, as conceived by Bakhtin, is perhaps the
only narrative genre capable of embodying a complete system of multi-class
social relations, intertextualizing and cannibalizing extant literary modes
while still maintaining its status as a polyvocal narrative artifact and one
single heteroglot unit of societal becoming (Bakhtin, The Dialogic 41116).
The equation of Bakhtins heteroglossia with the pragmatic coming together
of differing political viewpoints in a specific conflictual context needs some
explaining. Ferrns treatment of politics at times upholds our narrow understanding of this term as a negotiation of irreconcilable interests that assert
themselves in a legitimate environment where dispute takes priority over
decisionistic discipline (the definition privileged from Juan Donoso Corts
and Carl Schmitt to Jacques Rancire and Claude Lefort). At other times,
however, it engages the suspension of those narrow perspectives in a metapolitical dimension that favors the appearance of chance, just as Rancire
identifies the distinctive Greek form of democratic representation in Platos
lottery draw [le tirage au sort] wherein all qualifying citizens are given an
equal chance at being elected because they are equal (La haine 47).
In the pursuit of a dialogic literary project, Ferrn criticizes the form of
the national allegory, which collapses the Bildungsroman with a sanitized
nation-making narrative. He also challenges the attempts by classic ethnonationalism at placing the apparatuses created by the central states bourgeoisie in the hands of an autochthonous elite that continues to look down upon
the working classes and some of their vernacular cultural expressions. Most
other literary genres would be formally and conceptually dilapidated if they

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27

attempted to embrace the heterogeneous diversity of forms and materials


that go into the composition of a heteroglot novel. As Bakhtin has argued,
the rationalistic western poetics on which the system of genres rests has historically made playwrights, poets, and fiction writers internalize the superiority of unified and monologic points of view over decentered and dialogic
ones. Thus conceived, poetics and genre theory cannot do justice to the
multiple specificity of simultaneously preexisting compositional wholes
whose joint articulation may not take the form of a linear sequence unless
substantial symbolic violence is done to each whole. By contrast, Bakhtin
lays emphasis on a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential and
is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses (Problems 81).
The dialogic novel becomes what Dostoevsky himself called the form of a
still latent, unuttered future Word (qtd. in Bakhtin, Problems 90). These
aspirations find an echo in the evental dimension identified in metapolitical
philosophy as the threshold of becoming by which revolutionary irruptions
are regulated not by the display of particular positions of agency, but by the
random combination of multiple and mutually conflicting interests whose
shared commitment to change allows for multiple outcomes beyond
all predictions and calculations.4
For Bakhtin, the novel may represent all of the social and ideological
voices of its era as the shared existence of a plurality of consciousnesses
whose respective totalities have equal rights and therefore are not merged
in the unity of the event (Problems 6). They are not subjected to the reductive process by which one narrative whole is translated into the dominant
terms of another. As happens in Badiou and Rancire, in the dialogic narrative construct the event of subject co-constitution is forever deferred because
heteroglot fictions ideally resist the intervention of a monoglot authorial
consciousness.5 Furthermore, although the voices of dissent that in Ferrn
help articulate a genuine polyphony do matter, they are treated with as much
irony as the voices of their ideological enemies, which themselves are not
generally or cavalierly excluded.
Ferrns dazzling realization of this idea is his narrative tour de force,
Bretaa, Esmeraldina, an extreme example of plurinational dialogic literature inasmuch as the present of the story remains in fluctuating communication with multiple works about Brittany or by authors with a Breton name
(from the fourteenth-century Roman de Ponthus et de Sidoine to Jack Kerouac
and Alain Robbe-Grillet). Bretaa also deals in detail with the multiple chronotopes inhabited by the protagonist-narrators eleven different alter egos
and namesakes. These alter egos put the novels jailed protagonistthe
Breton-Galician terrorist and philologist Amaury-Paul-Marie-Gilart de
Keranflech, a.k.a. Amaury K.in contact with the rise of nineteenth-century
counter-revolutionary regionalisms in the sub-state nations of Europes
Atlantic faade; with the Nazi collaborationist successors of these regionalists

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

(the Milice Franaise and the Milice Bretonne) in the 1940s; and with medieval Breton and Welsh legends. Ferrn has used this philo-Celticist cultural
continuum to mask his political internationalism: as a communist, he
renounces neither the recognition of the Galician nations right to self-determination nor the emancipation of the working class living around the world
under a regime of either internal or imperial colonialism.
We could say with Bakhtin (and with modernist thinkers as disparate
as Bergson, Borges, and T.S. Eliot) that in Ferrns narratives the past is
directed by the present as much as the present is affected by the past.
Engaging the merits of Bretaa, Esmeraldina meaningfully requires a booklength study such as Anxo Angueiras A espiral no espello (2009), which is
twice the length of Ferrn novel. Retorno a Tagen Ata is admittedly a simpler
and leaner work, for which reason alone it remains the primary focus of the
present essay. The authors shifts in emphasis from Retorno to Bretaa eloquently illustrate the transition from the novel of revolution paradigm of the
early 1970s to the daring formal experimentations of the ensuing decade.
Numerous events happened in the sixteen years intervening between the
publication of the two novels: the poetics of desencanto or mournful commemoration of the depleted synergies of hope as the peaceful transition
from late Francoism to parliamentary democracy exposed revolutionary platforms as unrealizable utopias; support for Leninist Marxism dramatically
declined among the western European intelligentsia; postmodern skepticism
severely undermined the epistemic authority of master narratives while at
the same time underscoring the ontology of form generally; and presentoriented metafictions avoided critiquing the energized free market, as if the
subversion of narrative codes would correlate with the deregulation policies
implemented in state administration.
To varying degrees, some of these developments were represented,
albeit in an attenuated form, in such self-reflexive fictions of desencanto as
Gonzalo Torrente Ballesters Fragmentos de Apocalipsis (1977), Vctor
Fernndez Freixaness O tringulo inscrito na circunferencia (1982), and
Alfredo Condes Xa vai o griffn no vento (1984). Ferrn writes Bretaa
against the political apathy derived from the interplay of disenchantment and
democratic stability as well as the reading elites growing access to material
commodities. In addition to the three works just mentioned, between Retorno
and Bretaa two important novels of de-conversion from revolutionary politics were published: Carlos Casaress Xoguetes pra un tempo prohibido (1973)
and Xos Manuel Martnez Ocas A fuxida (1980), which references Ferrns
real-life attempts at gathering support for his radical partythe UPGamong
Galician immigrants in Switzerland (14344).
Late Francoism witnessed the flowering of both a novel of Catholic
counter-revolution and a novel of de-conversion from revolutionary LeninistMarxist positions. The latter mode was often practiced by intellectuals who
embraced bourgeois ethnonationalism. This development encouraged Ferrn

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29

to cast himself reactively in the role of novelist of revolution whose antisystemic position could not be easily dismissed, not least because it stubbornly
placed itself off center. In trying to neutralize the hegemony of counterrevolutionary fiction (from Torrente to Eduardo Mendoza and Freixanes),
Ferrn appropriates every destabilizing technique found in postmodern
fiction in order to release the ideological differences contained in local
histories. He proceeds to put these local histories to work again in the making
of an alternative master narrative of emancipation whose defining feature is
that it asserts its own constructed and contingent condition without letting
the reader escape into a self-referential play-world wherein political conflicts
and challenges cannotor should notbe seriously entertained. In so
doing, Ferrn opposes the historical inevitability of teleological designs while
at the same time conceding (contra Torrente) that textual artifacts may
legitimately be allowed to intervene in historical processes and vice versa.
His is an exemplary case of trying to link the historicity of texts to the
textuality of history.
In sum: the rise of a non-revolutionary Left in the late 1970s coincided
with the commercial and critical success of such masters of metafiction as
Torrente Ballester in Spain or Umberto Eco in Italy. Likewise, the study of the
novel was transformed by such studies in ideological skepticism as Tzvetan
Todorovs influential Introduction la littrature fantastique (1970), praised
by Carmen Martn Gaite in several of her works, and Roland Barthess Le
plaisir du texte (1973), saluted by Torrente as the culmination of literary criticisms break with vulgar realism and empirical sociology, that is, with history
as the primary horizon of interpretation. lvaro Cunqueiro, a strict coeval of
Torrente, had earlier pioneeredin Merln e familia (1955)an autochthonous brand of the fantastic mode in which the frontier between mythic
events and everyday life is blurred. He also wrote the first novel of counterrevolution in the indigenous language, As crnicas do sochantre (1956). Both
works use multiple narrators and foreground the active role of the audience
to the detriment of predictable plots. As crnicas is best described as a
Galician response to Alejo Carpentiers El reino de este mundo (1949): the
focus of the action shifts from the trans-Atlantic periphery of the French
empire (Haiti) to its domestic periphery (Brittany). Ferrns early influences
involve many Catholic conservative writers born in Galicia (Otero Pedrayo,
Cunqueiro, and Torrente), which explains why he has devoted such energy
to transvaluating existing narrative genres, decentering the ideological
assumptions connected to each form and convention of writing. Unsurprisingly,
his favorite writings in the theory of fiction are not by Todorov or Barthes.
They are, rather, by Fredric Jameson: The Political Unconscious (1981), which
explores how literary texts simultaneously conceal and reveal their ideology,
and Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism (1986),
which theorizes the concept of national allegory (Mndez Ferrn, Prlogo
12, 14).

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

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REVISIONS AND REVOLUTIONS: LAYING BARE


THE POLITICS OF CLASSIC NATIONALISM
Retorno a Tagen Ata is the book where Ferrns fictive counterpart to Galicia
first assumed the name used in the title and where the fictionalized Galicians
were called azerratas. They are the natives or residents of the soon-to-bedeclared autonomous territory of Tagen Ata, which is part of a morisco
plurinational state called Terra Ancha. This colonial state came into existence
as a Muslim empire in the twelfth century. The novellas protagonist, the
twenty-three-year-old student Rotbaf Luden, has developed a personality
that inhabits many locations and assumes many identities, or rather, inhabits
a discontinuous space and assumes a discontinuous identity. She is a child
of the Galician/azerrata diaspora in Spanish America. Rotbaf is a citizen of
the presumably independent island of Anat (one of Terra Anchas former
colonies overseas), in which a cosmopolitan and neocolonial bourgeois
society thrives by reproducing the ethnic and class differences inherited from
the colonial regime and its metropolitan center. Her family has been able to
associate freely with the islands intellectual and economic elites.
At the same time, Rotbaf has preserved her parents azerrata heritage
and resisted creolization through her reading of plays about Tagen Atas
armed struggle for independence from Terra Ancha and her constant
participation in patriotic events (Retorno 5254). In other words, Rotbaf
belongs to an immigrant community that has quickly achieved economic
success without allowing its collective/national identity to be diluted. As a
member of a self-complacent and economically privileged minority, she
grew up used to being served by ethnic subalternsblacks and mulattoes
while nurturing in her mind the persona of a contradictory expatriate
partisan. Spurred by the azerratas mysticism of the dominated [mstica do
dominado] and ethnic self-complacency [autosatisfaccin tnica], she
declares herself readyand willingto make the ultimate sacrifice for an
imagined nation which in her mind she never left: this was indeed a return
to Tagen Ata, where I had always been [tratbase dun retorno a Tagen Ata,
onde eu tia estado sempre] (Retorno 54). Her parents, we are told, are
considerably less belligerent: they had always lived on the ghettos edge,
with one foot in the neocolonial and cosmopolitan society of arrival, and
another in the endogamic rituals of the azerrata community. They beheld
with a mixture of affectionate irony and proud respect my interest in studying
comparative linguistics and my devotion to the tasks that the I.T.A. assigned
me [Habitaran sempre no lmite xusto do ghetto, cun p na sociedade
cosmopolita neocolonial e outro nos rituais endogmicos da colectividade
azerrata, e contemplaban, cunha mestura de irona afectuosa e orgulloso
respeto, a mina adicacin aos mesteres da I.T.A. e o meu interese nos estudos
de lingstica comparada] (Retorno 54). Upon arriving in her ancestors
homeland, Rotbaf is shocked to discover that azerratas are stratified according

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to their trade and geographical origins, so much so that unskilled peasants


who migrated from the country to the city are treated by fellow compatriots
in a harsher way than mulatto servants in Anat were treated by the creole
elites of azerrata descent. She also discovers that upwardly mobile manual
laborers do not support the classic nationalism [nacionalismo clsico]
also called ethnonationalism in the academic literaturestill advocated by
the Irmandades de Tagen Ata or I.T.A. (Retorno 69).
According to Ferrn, classic nationalism constructed the fiction that the
community of azerrata speakers is an organic corporation in which all
societal groups are equitably represented according to their talents and
professions. In other words, the privileged minorities of Tagen Ata have
sublimated their domination of the subaltern class into a pastoral of defeat
by which they all feel equally oppressed by a mutual external enemyTerra
Anchamarked as foreign. Ethnonationalism thus appears as the producer
of a monologic consciousness that suppresses all other differential factors,
including class consciousness. Ferrn was the first Galician author who turned
classic nationalisms inability to address adequately the workers desire to
emancipate themselves from capitalist exploitation into a main focus of his
fiction without letting either nationalism or revolutionary Marxism dominate
the remaining indices of local differentiation.
What Bakhtin says about Dostoevskys characters can be applied to
Ferrns: in their conversations and interactions, they never argue over separate points, but always over whole points of view, inserting themselves and
their entire idea into even the briefest exchange (Problems 96). Take the
example of Bretaa, Esmeraldina. The novel adopts the form of a lengthy
and digressive letter written over the course of many years (as is revealed on
239) in which the incarcerated Amaury K. regularly apostrophizes his beloved,
Esmeraldina; he mixes the conventions of courtly literature with his fragmentary memories and with minute accounts of the conversations that take place
around him in prison regarding the plotting of a mass uprising. Since Amaury
K. suffers from a memory disorder and doubts his own identity, a number of
fantastic beings and ghostly alter egos (from talking birds to dead Breton
bishops and wartime collaborationistes) take turns in undermining the protagonist-narrators control over his first-person account. A vast fresco of opinions casts light on Tagen Atas political present and possible futures.
Furthermore, no resolution of the existing social conflicts is provided as the
narrative teasingly moves the reader closer to the imminent onset of a revolutionary process whose organizing details and larger goals remain unspecified.6 In this manner, the revolution as event may resist appropriation by a
single party just as dialogic discourses resist monologic denouements.
This strategy is reminiscent of metapolitical philosophys recommendation that the political faithful wait with religious fervor for the advent of a
fortuitous cataclysmic occurrence, which they may consider embracing
regardless of how it presents itself because in principle it does not conform

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

to any totalitarian or state power due to its very unpredictability. Understood


as an event, this moment of historical catastrophe may come to signify the
possibility of truly self-emancipating breaks in the status quo, of a community randomly rising above particular interests at an eruption of maximal
intensity. It has also come to signify, from the poststructuralist perspective
that textualizes revolutionary politics, the felicitous environment for an
emerging subject who stays faithful to the eventa purely hazardous vnement whose occurrence is not necessarily inferred from a preexisting
situation or surrounding contextand strives for the realization of the multiple yet indecisive new possibilities opened up by this radical break
(Badiou 215).
The new subject and new truth do not exist objectively, but rather are
constructed in relation to the event through a loyalty born out of faith
(fidlit) to the prospect of the as-yet unrealized occurrence. For Badiou,
Christs resurrection constitutes the canonical event, while the Pauline
conversion to the wait for this Second Coming and Pauls unfulfilled
witnessing to it constitute the subject and the truth in fidelity to the event.
For Ferrn, the return of King Arthur provides the pattern of continuity
without conclusionfidelityrequired to legitimate and give shape to an
otherwise fortuitous moment of rupture: in Bretaa, the prison inmate Lins
Leabertkolm deliberately nourishes an Arthurian charisma as Messiah and
revolutionary icon from the isolation cell that he will escape one day to lead
a nation-wide uprising (266). Ferrns constant play on Tagen Atas analogies
with Celtic-Breton lore is supported by Galicias belonging in the Atlantic
sisterhood of the legendary Seven Celtic Nations. Ferrns dialogic project
appropriates rhetorical strategies drawn from typology, folklore, philology,
and the medieval love lyric, as well as from such narrative genres as the
political thriller, the quest romance, the adventure tale, the Bildungsroman,
and the fantastic. Through the interchangeability of Galicias and Brittanys
respective political histories, traditional repositories, and present social
conditions, Ferrn de-essentializes and decenters the claims to transcendental
identity made by classic sub-state nationalism.
For an example in Ferrn of the Bakhtinian decentering of individual
consciousness, let us turn to Retornos protagonist. Rotbaf is a recent university graduate and seems to withdraw regularly into a twilight zone in which
fragmentary memories alternate with an iron will to change a status quo
whose roots she does not fully understand. Above all, she only intimates
intermittently her complicity with the structures of economic domination
either in her native island of Anat or in her familys ancestral Tagen Ata. We
immediately realize that her desire for a nation of her own creation becomes
confused with her repressed sexual desires, a topic about which a midTransition feminist, the journalist and novelist Montserrat Roig (a former
member of the Catalan Communist Party [PSUC]), was to write at length in
her collection of articles and interviews, Tiempo de mujer? (1980), while

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philosopher Jos Luis Aranguren devoted to it briefer comments in Sobre


imagen, identidad y heterodoxia (1981). In contrast with Rotbafs polymorphous emotional intensity, her parents are said to have been merry, young,
and skeptical [ledos, xovens e escpticos] (Retorno 54). Through the character
of Rotbaf, the novel romanticizes revolutionary politics and sexual liberation,
a two-way process that was dramatized in the same decade by such novels
of de-conversion from revolutionary militancy (or novels of belated, halfhearted conversion to it) by Carlos Casares (Xoguetes pra un tempo prohibido [1973]), Luis Goytisolo (Recuento [1974]), Jos Mara Guelbenzu (La
noche en casa [1977]), and Roig (Lhora violeta [1980]).
Many of the piercing ironies contained in Ferrns novella are directed
against Rotbaf and her main antagonist and object of her exuberant sexual
desires, the charismatic azerrata intellectual Ulm Roan. Rotbaf and Ulm are
exactly 17 years apart, like Ferrn and Pieiro. Since the latters prologue to
Ferrns short-story collection O crepsculo e as formigas (1961) constitutes
one of the last publishing enterprises in which mentor and protg actively
collaborated, one may even conjecture that Retorno a Tagen Ata is, among
many other things, both a roman clef and an acting-out of Ferrns ultimate
breakup with Pieiro in the sixties.7 Note also that the last five letters of Ulm
Roan feature an anagram of Ramn. Neither character seems bothered by
the class divisions underlying the facile distinction each makes between a
galeguista and a non-galeguista consciousness, so much so that the narrative
takes delight in flaunting the blind spots in their respective positions. It is to
Ferrns credit that he turns the rapports between protagonist and antagonist
between Rotbaf and Ulminto an occasion for a dialogic exchange without
letting cultural galeguismo absorb its revolutionary nemesis or vice versa. To
paraphrase Bakhtin, in an open-ended narrative whole such as Retorno, in
which all social classes and degrees of commitment to agendas for change
are paraded before the readers eyes, the heterogeneity of the discrete smaller
totalitiesof each voice and its worldis not subsumed into a monologic discourse.8
The politics of nostalgia for the lost nation is also called into question.
Thus, Ferrn makes Ulm Roan not only the former leader of a clandestine
party he has just dissolvedthe Irmandades de Tagen Atabut also a poeta
da saudade and (like the author and many of his other characters) a romance
philologist in his own right.9 The saudade poetics projects the immutable
wholeness of the nation into a monolithic past; it construes the historical
sliding of the long-lost past into the present as a series of alienating ruptures
that become paradoxically enabling conditions for the essentializing of a
national identity whose intensity becomes stronger as the emotional suffering also becomes accentuated. The meaning of the nations future is given,
as it were, in advance, as happens with Gods names in patristic exegesis.10
The rhetoric of saudade is rooted in the expectation that ones prospect of
reaching emotional plenitude may be directly enabled by the contemplation

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

of a regained landscape and a homeland whose earlier absence had


unleashed a negative yet authentically profound intensity. While saudade
functions alternately as an affective landscape and an ideology of monologic
restitution, it may also be used by the oppressed subject as a strategy to
break out of oppression, as happens with the imprisoned protagonist in
Bretaa, Esmeraldina, or with Alfonso Rodrguez Castelaos seminal essay,
Sempre en Galiza (1944).
Ferrn makes Rotbaf a prospective graduate student in linguistics for at
least two reasons. The first one is to expose as problematic her all-too-ready
equations of original language and original nation (one of the blind spots
shared by nineteenth-century philology and classic nationalism). The second
reason is to explore Rotbafs conversion from aspiring organic intellectual to
clandestine activist and Ulm Roans surprising conversion (in Rotbafs eyes)
from organic to traditional intellectual. As a child growing up in Anat,
Rotbaf became infatuated with the idealized literary image of an Ulm Roan
whom she had not yet met, but whom she was ready to embrace as a
national poet, an academic mentor, a political leader, and a lover. In the
course of Retorno a Tagen Ata, she experiences a dream in which she kills
her love interest shortly after they meet and have made love in the impertinent and loquacious manner of a French new-wave film. This is her way of
saying quietly to herself that she must not yield to the temptation of letting
her philologists budding career and emotional vulnerability be instrumentalized by the watered-down cultural regionalism now advocated by Ulm
Roan/ Ramn Pieiro. Tagen Ata will indeed be described in the later novel,
Bretaa, Esmeraldina, as a nation despicably regionalized by Terra Anchas
republican regime [vilmente rexionalizado polo rexime republicano de
Terra Ancha] (11).
Rotbaf seems to realize that Ulm Roanas the embodiment of the cosmopolitan Galician letradowishes to remain symbolically in control of a
process of cultural emancipation that is purely belletristic. This is one of the
goals that Pieiro attempted to accomplish in his pseudo-Heideggerian
essays, which Ferrn caricaturizes with undissimulated irony. Sociologys
empirical method, Ulm reasons in a declamatory speech to Rotbaf, is blind
to the vibrating flames and to the radical experiencing of the absolute Poets
can still lead their fatherland. At forty I realize that all I can do is to write
poems. And save the essences: our vernacular language. I know well that I
cannot save the nation [cego chama vibradoira do esprito e radical
vivencia do absoluto Inda os poetas poden dirixir as patrias. Aos corenta
anos dectome de que non podo facer outramente que poemas. E salvar as
esencias: a fala. Non podo salvar ao pas, ben o sei] (Retorno 75).11 Shortly
afterwards Ulm Roan makes a half-hearted attempt at de-essentializing his
position, calling itin a direct reference to the ethics of compromise or
cooptation adopted by numerous liberal-minded intellectuals under Franco
to begin in the 1960s the protracted process of apertura from within the

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systema realism or possibilism [realismo, ou posibilismo] (Retorno 77). At


the same time, throughout the novella Ulm Roan expresses his disdain for
Tagen Atas politically active manual laborers, who may choose to speed up
changes from outside by means of an armed uprising. These industrial workers are for Ferrn the latent enemy of the emerging culturalist bourgeoisie.
They constitute the main leftist threat to the possibilist local lites hegemonic
position as Terra Anchas privileged interlocutors in the project of limited
shared governance or autonoma (Retorno 81).
Ferrns novella suggests that the growth of the azerrata language may
result in the separation of the literary register, artificially recovered and
administered by the culturalist intelligentsia, from its colloquial counterpartthe fictive equivalent of the authentic yet impure and mongrel Galician
spoken by the peasants. In the 1960s the latter register was beautifully stylized (without adhering to Pieiros or Otero Pedrayos hyperculturalist discourse) by poet Manuel Mara and novelist Xos Neira Vilasboth sociorealist writers. The connection between standardizing an intellectualized
version of the vernacular language and building a moderately autonomous,
self-differentiated pas (Ulm Roan and Pieiros nondescript word for nation,
which harks back to Enlightenment regionalisms Amigos do Pas societies
founded in the course of the centralizing eighteenth century) naturalizes
class differences within an azerrata community organized around a dubious
meritocracy.12 Significantly, Ulm Roan continues to romanticize his chosen
role as inspired bard of a pre-political nation and the arch-mediator of a
bilingual lettered city in which the growing equality between the languages
is not accompanied by shared sovereignty between sub-state authorities
(azerrata/Galician) and state ones, let alone by the narrowing of the class
differences theretofore justified by an unequal yet legitimate distribution of
wealth. The novella ends with Rotbaf forgoing her chance to assassinate the
traitor Ulm. She simply abandons him after writing a paradoxical note in
which she states both her unabated love for him and her revulsion at his
treason, as if she were sublimating her sexual attraction to Ulm Roan into the
nationalist creed that he once may have sincerely espoused.13
The ending also features what one may call an instance of interclass
solidarity. Medieval romances greatly idealize the relationship between the
courtly knight-errant (who stands at one end of the culture continuum) and
the wild man to the detriment of the burghers quick socio-economic
ascent. What Tagen Atas peasants and dclass nationalists-turnedguerrilleiros or revolutionaries have in common is that they speak azerrata/
Galician and do not see the bureaucratic apparatuses of Terra Ancha/
Castilian-centric Spain as a hospitable framework for the realization of their
national aspirations, which have been despicably regionalized for too long.
At the close of Retorno a Tagen Ata, Rotbaf flamboyantly borrows a
horse from the peasant freedom-fighters who work as neo-feudal servants in
Ulm Roans household to ride into Tagen Atas magic forestthe Grande

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

Fraga. In this forest, which takes up 60 percent of Tagen Atas surface, the
knight Percival, an Arthurian symbol in the colonized nations prophetic
cycle, also finds his strength each time he is able to return from the world of
the dead. The forest will in later works (Arnoia, Arnoia [1985] and Bretaa,
Esmeraldina [1987]) be called symbolically Brocelianda by reference to
Chrtien de Troyess quest romances. Conceived as a sort of minor Purgatory,
the forest is riddled with treacherous passages that test the heros determination as he/she withdraws from culture to find a new space beyond natures
arcane world.14 Indeed, the last few pages of Retorno a Tagen Ata feature the
first joint appearance of the world of medieval chivalry and the world of the
nationalist struggle for political independence, a powerful combination that
is at the basis of Ferrns masterpiece, Bretaa, Esmeraldina.
Bretaa expands on storylines already presented in the novellas Retorno
a Tagen Ata and Arnoia, Arnoia as well as short stories such as the
Kafkaesque Familia de agrimensores (1980) and the now canonical Amor
de Artur (1982). Ferrns individual works dealing with Tagen Ata do not
feature an internal linear chronology nor does their order of publication
follow the unfolding of Tagen Atas fictional history from the distant past
forward. Bretaa, Esmeraldina features the novelty that the armed guerrilla
first presented in Retorno now constitutes just one of three existential
domains of dissent fully displayed in the novel. A second domain is Bretaa
(this sub-state nations history, ethnographic realities, and literary traditions),
which stands in an ambiguous referential relation to Tagen Ata. Is Amaury
K. a Breton-born philologist specializing in Tagen Atas vernacular language
and culture, who at some point joined the azerrata resistance, as he thinks
he has? Or is he an azerrata-born philologist in love with all things Breton,
who finds in this rich foreign lore consolation for the torture he has suffered
in the prison system of an autonomous Tagen Ata? The internationalist strategy at work in the novel precludes a definitive answer to this question. The
third existential domain is that of medieval and ancient myths, which exist
outside history and predate the constitution of Terra Ancha as a state in the
later Middle Ages.
The method of composition used in Bretaa, Esmeraldina corresponds
to what has been called the ethnographic-surrealist mode (in James L.
Cliffords designation, which uses Georges Batailles Eurocentric descriptions
of non-European social worlds as his main example) or the neofantstico
(in Jaime Alazrakis, which uses Cortzars La noche boca arriba and
Axolotl as its quintessential examples). Through this strategy, Ferrn eliminates existing hierarchies between wakeful and dream-like experiences: he
defamiliarizes the protagonistsand the readersimmediate surroundings
(the here-and-now of Tagen Ata/ Galicia becomes unmoored) while approximating the exotic world as if it inhabited the readers here-and-now. At the
same time, he points out that Bretaa is his symbol for repressed and unconsecrated national identities worldwide whose cultural specificity and right to

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self-determination should not be denied. Bretaa accordingly directs the


readers attention to the protagonists immersion in an intermittent, booklength rverie triggered off by the guerrilleiro-protagonists efforts at remembering his true identity. He not only suffers post-traumatic memory disorders
caused by his police detention, but he also needs to escape the harsh realities of a lifelong incarceration by fleeing into a parallel world of the imagination, which his status as erudite philologist makes realistic.
Ferrns constant concern with parallel worlds of the mindwith spatial
alterities and the ontology of fictionis complemented by his attention to
Galicias accelerated urban transformation. Among the themes from the sixties fictionalized in Retorno a Tagen Ata is the growth of the cities arrabaldos or inter-class residential suburbs, where industrious blue-collar workers
and the progressive middle class live side by side. Rotbafs aunt, Natalia,
belongs to the second group of arrabaldo residents. The aunt had first
appeared under the name Natalia Olsen in Ferrns Arrabaldo do norte
(1964), an understudied novel in which Galicia is allegorized as a newly
urbanized district located to the north of an expanding town and increasingly adjacent to it.15 Once urbanized, that pagus in the north continues to
grow without losing its social and anthropological specificity. The essence of
the arrabaldo remains a mystery for outsiders, who are nonetheless mysteriously drawn to it (Arrabaldo 3637). In this threshold locality, seemingly
unmotivated and absurd tensions arise between a troubled stranger coming
from a southern village and a native of the northern extension, who brutally
beats up the visitor after the latter insists on searching the local residents
homehe had previously searched Natalia Olsenswithout an apparent
motive other than his otherwise inexplicably inquisitive obsession (Arrabaldo
11724). The shift from Arrabaldo do norte to Retorno a Tagen Ata enacts a
transition from what R.-M. Albrs once memorably called the roman de
lhomme traqu or novel of social and existential alienation to the novel of
revolution, from erratic and enigmatic acts carried out on impulse to actions
and counter-actions which are sometimes planned, sometimes hazardous.16
In Retorno a Tagen Ata, Natalia states that both social groups living in
the arrabaldothe upwardly mobile blue-collar workers and the progressive,
intellectually inclined middle classare almost immune to the attraction of
nationalist parties. The reason for this is that they have long identified their
desire for freedom with the utopian emancipation of labor and with womens
liberation worldwide rather than with the sub-state nations growing
independence from the central state apparatuses, a project riddled with
socio-political pitfalls and ambiguities.17 Tagen Atas large-scale agricultural
production units appear to be in the hands of absentee landlords, so that the
peasantry has been reduced to the status of neo-feudal subalternity. The
featured country dwellers include peasantsservants, farm tenants, and
salaried workers [campesioscriados, caseiros e xornaleiros] rather than
small proprietors (Retorno 81). Ulm Roan sophistically justifies the rustics

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

oppression by invoking the ownership rights consecrated in ius naturale, an


unwritten charter of paradoxically inalienable rights that the modern liberaldemocratic state should not accept. He also accuses the subalternized
populationhere Ferrn takes a jab at Pieiros unreasonable hatred of
Marxismof seeking a fraternal alliance with industrial workers, who are
as you knowpoisoned [contubernio fraternal cos operarios industriais,
que estnxa sabesenvelenados] (Retorno 81). In other words, those who
are not landowners become potential runaway rebelscimarrns is the
argot term favored by Ulm Roanagainst both Terra Anchas authorities and
the regionalist caciques, who feel entitled (like Ulm Roan) to tell the
improvident peasantry what to think and how to endure passively their
nuda vita or bare life.
For Ferrn, an effective form of resistance to the alliance forged by Terra
Anchas authorities with Tagen Atas coopted privileged minorities would
have to involve a counter-alliance formed also according to the logic of
equivalences. This cordial entente would feature the progressive lowermiddle classes (aunt Natalia and others like her), factory workers (who in the
novel appear to profess either a Marxist or an anarchist ideology), and those
cimarrns who may remain loyal to the radicalized expatriate azerratas (i.e.,
the Galicia Exterior) that produced Rotbaf. An anti-systemic coalition is thus
formed by self-differentiated constituencies which historically have had trouble uniting their efforts in a common front unless they became aware first of
having a common oppressor. The utopian aspiration found in Ferrns political fictions is linked to his anti-statist stance as citizen. In Bretaa,
Esmeraldina, it becomes apparent that the protagonist-narrators enemy
Terra Anchais a liberal state organized in the form of a parliamentary
democracy in which minorities have been voted down. In no other institutionally correct setting would the impending recognition of a small nations
right to implement bilingual education and to administrative autonomy be
possible.18 Despite these advances, Amaury K. joined Tagen Atas armed
resistance to Terra Anchas rule.
In making his partisan protagonists fight against a republican legal
order in both novels, Ferrn draws attention to the arbitrariness and contingency of the states jurisprudence and executive decisions. Only the sovereign state can turn rights into laws. But in order to do this, it has to conceal
the violence inherent in the originating moment of transforming exceptions
to the former legal order into foundational or instituting moments of the new
order according to the logic of decisionistic action.19 The legal status quo
agreed upon by Ulm Roans regionalists and Terra Anchas central
governmentthe dystopian estado das autonomas that Ferrn was able to
envision almost while in prison in 1970would be illegitimate to the extent
that it was not sanctioned by the higher authority represented by the diasporic yet highly organized azerrata nation. Although Ferrn presents this
nation in the guise of a legitimate and long-standing corporation, it can only

Ferrn and the Novel of Revolution

39

be found scattered through multiple locations in the Americas and Tagen


Atas rural parishes. This large constituency would have opposed the downgrading of nationalism to regionalism in exchange for minor concessions in
the sub-state enclaves right to cultural self-expression. What Ferrn has been
promoting throughout his writing career is Galicias right to self-government
and self-determination.

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FERRNS RETURNS: DIS-ALIENATION, UNFINISHED


REVOLUTIONS, OPEN-ENDED NARRATIVES
In Retorno, Tagen Atas regionalist/nationalist bourgeoisie and working class
appear to have competing economic and political interests despite considering themselves equally disenfranchised in relation to Terra Anchas bureaucratic class. The two groups might indeed have fought on opposite sides in
a different institutional context. Similarly, although Rotbaf may call her parents and her aunt Natalia skeptical (this is Ferrns revealing word to
describe the older members of her family), and consider Ulm Roan a traitor,
she still accepts that each represents an alternative manner of feeling azerrata, that is to say, galeguista. The implications of this acknowledgment are,
first, that rebellion and affirmation are for Ferrn the two sides of belonging
to a community or a nation; and second, that authentic communities offer
their members multiple opportunities for alienation as much as identification. With dis-alienation comes also dis-identification: a floating, unmoored
self is produced when the energies previously channeled into resisting an
external power become dispersed and erratic once that power disappears or
ceases to be perceived as oppressive.20 In Ferrns novels, the salaried middle
class is challenged to ride the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm (not just
progressivism in the abstract), which from Marx to various post-Stalinist versions of the class struggle transcends the strategic stage of interclass solidarity to become a general aspiration of the human condition. In Spain, the
breakup between anti-capitalist persuasions and the larger, multi-group
struggle for greater equality took place in the wake of the 1979 election,
which did not bring the revolutionary socialists of the PSOE the desired percentage of votes, forcing the party to move to the center in preparation for
its momentous victory at the 1982 general election.
In Retorno a Tagen Ata, Ferrn makes heuristic use of anachronisms and
takes literary liberties that at times render the identification of Galicia with
Tagen Ata problematic. For example, his azerratas are divided into at least
four social groups: first, there is the class of entrepreneurs and their nearly
invisible intellectuals and bureaucrats who have long supported, and benefited from, Terra Anchas domination. Second, there is the class of salaried,
gradually less exploited laborers, such as the skilled workers who reside in
the citys northern extension and form perhaps the azerrata societys most

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

dynamic sector [os operarios que residen no arrabaldo do Norte e constiten,


se acaso, o sector mis dinmico da sociedade azerrata] (Retorno 69). These
upwardly mobile citizens have turned their backs on nationalist platforms
because classic ethnonationalism does not represent their class interests qua
workers. Third, there are the ubiquitous and impoverished peasants who do
not own the land and are downgraded in large numbers to the subaltern
position of servants (criados). And fourth, there is the nationalist intelligentsia, whose ranks Rotbaf had for several years longed to join upon arrival in
Tagen Ata despite the increasing divide between two distinct factions: on
one hand, the culturalist sidethe fictional counterpart to the historical
pieiristasaiming to assert its cultural self-differentiation but not necessarily to achieve administrative autonomy; and on the other, the more belligerent galeguistas do exterior, who still push for the treatment of Galicia as a
sub-state nation in Castelaos federalist manner.
At times Ferrn makes painstaking efforts to describe, and even analyze,
the changing institutions of Tagen Ata vis--vis those of Anat, and especially
Terra Ancha, which are historicized from one novel or story to the next in
the evolving cycle that constitutes la matire de Tagen Ata. Still, the few critics who have dared to engage this side of Ferrns output have cavalierly
called it an ahistorical fantasy on the ground that it does not really describe
any recognizable sub-state nation. But does it? Contrary to what one conservative critic surmises, Ferrns attention to the features of a parallel fictive
universe endowed with a paradoxical chronology of its own does not betray
a millenarian fear of history or an absolute preference for a politically
mobilizing myth over the claims of history and a more comprehensive
imagination.21 Rather, this displacement, like the authors allegorization of
his philologist-activist self in a female alter ego and of Latin Americas large
Galician community in Anat, fulfilled the twofold purpose of escaping censorship and implementing important distancing devices. Such strategies
make the story resonate beyond its immediate contexts of composition while
simultaneously attenuating the Galician readers cathartic investment in it.
Ferrns main departures from a realistic depiction of social structures in
the Iberian northwest also include the obliteration of the institution of minifundium and the near-invisibility of Terra Anchas natives and of politically
unengaged azerratas. The central governments repressive state apparatuses
seem almost invisible, which is also the case in Torrentes counterrevolutionary Transition novel set in Santiago de Compostela/ Villasanta de
la EstrellaFragmentos de Apocalipsis. In Tagen Ata, all the peasants are
conveniently landless and impecunious. This massive subalternizing of the
country-dwelling population would explain why they have been won over
in very large numbers to the cause of either communism or left-wing nationalism. It also seems to be part of Ferrns strategy to counter the discourse of
fear advanced by right-wing parties during the Second Republic. In the thirties, the regionalist right wing consistently played the red scare card, telling

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modest landholders and proprietors that they were like any other landowner
(large or small) in a weak and flawed case of equivalential logic. Even the
cattle that yeomen and farm hands might own would be snatched away by
left-wing nationalists should the latter ever come to power. Moreover, Retorno
a Tagen Ata features a slightly archaic fabric of social relations. In Terra
Ancha there seems to be little upward mobility, which makes it all the more
urgent for peasants, miners, and factory workers to become revolutionaries.
The fact that these groups remain disunited as the novel reaches its conclusion attests to Ferrns interest in resisting the resolution of dialogic variables
into a monologic discourse.
The revolutionary forms of political militancy that Rotbaf expected to
find when she arrived in a gradually regionalized Tagen Ata have in fact
been replaced by the triumphant consensus politics embodied in Terra
Anchas cooptation of sub-state nationalisms. In her ancestors land she is
welcomed by her liberated aunt, Natalia, a skeptical and mundane intellectual [intelectual escptica e mundana] (Retorno 63). Natalia appears to
be another romance philologist who looks down on Proust and rambles
about the latest Prix Goncourt, possibly an author in the nouveau roman
mode (an aesthetics that Ferrn had intertextualized in his earlier fiction, as
noted above). Unlike Rotbafs parents and Ulm Roan, Aunt Natalia does not
have any servants. Since Rotbaf hails from a highly stratified SpanishAmerican society that she has internalized as second nature, she does not
seem bothered in the least by the class differences that some of her regionalist interlocutors in Tagen Ata have kept in place. To her credit, she also
seems aware that her romanticizing of personal attachments and political
affiliations often gets in the way of her best judgment. At the close of the
narrative, she rides into the forest on a horse provided by Ulm Roans servants, who are infiltrated cimarrns and whom he embarrasses by making
them wear the Galician rustics folkloric attire in an urban setting. In this
manner, the narrative pits herthe representative of the idealistic and idealized Galicia Exteriorand the radicalized peasantry against Ulm Roans
coopted neo-regionalists, Terra Anchas central state, and de-nationalizing
capitalist forces.
In riding off on her horse, Rotbaf dialectically negates her belonging to
a mildly dissenting yet privileged group which has forgone its opportunity to
fight for something other than the mere survival of Tagen Atas language
(Ulm Roans position) in a situation of di-lingismo or institutionally sanctioned diglossia. The difference involved in this negation features both an
element of contrariety and one of contradiction to the extent that she risks
alienating herself from her utopian resolve to combat Terra Ancha, for which
purpose she first needs to dialectize Tagen Atas abject regionalism. Although
there is no indication in the text that she has already become a Marxist revolutionary (we infer that she does in the later novel, Bretaa, Esmeraldina),
she vows to join the nationalist Resistencia awaiting her at the end of her

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passage through the forest. The novella moves from the expatriation of
Rotbafs moderate parents in Anat to her inner self-exile in the Grande Fraga
immediately following her arrival in Tagen Ata. Her return is not so much
to the fatherland as it is to the independentist activism betrayed by Ulm
Roan. In fact, only one page is spent on narrating her journey from Anat to
Tagen Ata. The symbolism of the homecoming journey is concentrated
instead on her venturing into the Grande Fraga. In other words, the only
return still open to Rotbaf involves her sustained antagonizing and eventual defeat of Terra Anchas state institutions after her extraordinary prise de
conscience, which also entails an Oedipal/generational rebellion against the
parental authority embodied by Ulm Roan.22
Rotbaf effectively separates herself from the coopted local intelligentsia
by venturing into a Brocelianda of the mind out of which she may emerge
(or not) a new political subject ready to forge destabilizing alliances between
the internationalist representatives of the working class and nationalist patriots like herself. As a result of her ambivalent responsiveness to class issues,
Retorno a Tagen Ata resists offering an easy solution to the problem of how
to insert a vector of egalitarian inclusiveness into an advance-guard intelligentsias legitimate desire for national self-determination. To quote Immanuel
Wallersteins incisive words: For more than a hundred years, the world Left
has bemoaned its dilemma that the worlds workers have all too often organized themselves in people forms. But this is not a soluble dilemma. It
derives from the contradictions of the system. There cannot be fr sich class
activity that is entirely divorced from people-based political activity (85).
Ferrns narrative works correlate what Wallerstein calls people forms with
novel forms. They attempt the dialogic hybridizing of the novel of revolution with the female Bildungsroman and the medieval quest romance (signified by Rotbafs horse ride into Brocelianda and the symbolic landscape that
defines la matire de Tagen Ata), which have historically been antagonistic
to the modes of partisan political fiction.
In Retorno a Tagen Ata, Ferrn decisively defers and displaces the
outcome of the revolution into the realm of the fantastic understood as the
dimension in which the readers rationalistic criteria for separating the
plausible from the implausible become ineffectual. In later works, he will
increase the number of intertextualized genres and conventions that make
multiple collateral branches grow out of the main plot. Bretaa, Esmeraldina
thus becomes more than a simple novel. It is also a veritable encyclopedia
of novel forms and forms of starting a revolutionary process. Taken
collectively, Ferrns narratives set in Tagen Ata constitute an intriguing
fictionalization of the dilemma posed by Wallerstein: which should come
first, nation-making projects or revolutionary actions? At the same time, they
transculturate the exhausted novel-of-revolution mode into more marketable
forms of metafiction, which Ferrn first encountered in Julio Cortzar,
Cunqueiro, and Torrente Ballester.

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As French philosophers began to cast the fatigue of Leninist communism in the form of a fin de lhistoire (as in Henri Lefebvres book of that title
published in 1970), the novel of revolution slowly but surely gave way to a
new revolution in the novel form whereby history was no longer treated as
the unproblematic realm of vulgar materialism. In fact, as we move from
Retorno a Tagen Ata (1971) to Bretaa, Esmerladina (1987), we notice a
shift from the nostalgia for the transparency that history had for earlier
Marxist writers toward the acceptance of historys multi-layered textuality
without renouncing the claims that each dimension of experience makes on
the politically responsive citizen-reader. Ferrn has not published a new
novel about Tagen Ata since 1987. However, his influence can be traced in
the recent fiction of Antn Lopo, a.k.a. Antn Rodrguez Lpez. In Lopos
Obediencia (2010), a female mathematician living in the 2125 city-state of
Compostela escapes from the bucolic mental asylum to which she has
been confined to join another Resistencia called Alogon. Elba Mcara, as
this alienated woman is named, does not venture into Rotbafs environmentally friendly Grande Fraga, but into the polluted and lawless Alemparte
(the place-beyond in a Galicia severed from its former administrative capital), where biopolitics performs its work of revealing the non-citizens bare
life in all its vulnerabilty and dispossession. Lopos bleak allegory of how
central and peripheral nationalisms alike have contributed to precipitating a
worldwide military Apocalypse and Empires global domination is focused
on the dwarfed city-states creation and monitoring of memories (both personal and collective) through a chargeable device called memory steam,
which has now been implanted in the human body. In the Compostela of the
twenty-second century, each citizens lived memories are mixed with other
recollections, which are programmed, purchased or otherwise acquired
without the mediation of a preexisting lived experience.
Obediencia also speaks to such environmental crises as global warming
and the disappearance of drinking water, as well as the power of technology
to produce the mirage of its own resistance. Both the official regime and its
outlawed otherAlogonare ultimately generated and regulated by a supercomputer called Superorganismo and the mathematician-technocrats
involved with its development. Galicias present administrative capital is all
that is left of the independent Repblica Galega, to which an unspecified
Confederacin provides military protection. The city is no longer the destination of peaceful Catholic pilgrims, but houses instead a thriving weapon
industry in a world permanently at war, while Castilian ceased to be spoken
in the Iberian Peninsula except for some primitive villages in Cantabrias
mountains [primitivas aldeas das montaas cntabras] (Lopo 210).
In moving from Ferrn to Lopo (who is also a member of Redes Escarlatas
and a prolific journalist), we shift from political fiction to science fiction to
witness a complementary critique of globalizations technological teleologies
and relative indifference to environmental, demographic, and human rights

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

crises. Additionally, Ferrns and Lopos novels can be treated as agents of


discursive resistance to the enforced uniformity of Empire because they challenge the Galician nationalist reader to eschew the notorious falsifications of
the past often found, on the one hand, in official histories of the Spanish
state and its sub-state nations, and, on the other hand, in more recent historiographic metafictions that either oppose or consecrate the relations between
center and periphery.23
Furthermore, the three novels under discussion enact each an intervention in the power/resistance binomial that structures revolutionary actions:
first, resistance movements may try to bring about a mass uprising in the
romantic belief that the heterogeneous claims of history, nation, and class
can be made to coincide with the demands of a polymorphous and evolving
present (Retorno); second, the event of the revolution may happenif it ever
doesin tandem with a system of domination that is divided against itself
and therefore allows for random reshufflings in the balance of forces
(Bretaa); and third, the system itself may strategically create the simulacrum of a resistance movement which the oppressed navely embrace of
their own accord (Obediencia). In conclusion: Ferrn and Lopo seem especially interested in channeling existing social energies into the open-ended
project of envisioning the plural futures that may (or may not) be available
to us in our ever fragile civil society. For reasons both aesthetic and political,
Ferrns body of work certainly deservesas does Loposgreater critical
attention in Galicia and elsewhere.

NOTES
1. See Salgado and Casado (12833) for Ferrns own partial account of this process. I mention Pieiro
here because Ferrn used him as inspiration for the character of Ulm Roan, the regionalist leader who
betrays radical nationalism in Retorno a Tagen Ata. Ferrns continues to be a minority perspective on
Pieiro, who has elicited countless hagiographic treatments in moderate nationalist circles (e.g., Fernndez
del Riego 1113; Gonzlez Tosar).
2. Between 1964 and 1980 Ferrn alternated relatively brief stays in prison with his high-school teaching of French and the co-founding of such radical political parties as UPG-Unin do Pobo Galego (created in 1963 and formally established in 1964), Unin do Pobo Galego-lia proletaria (1977), Partido
Galego do Proletariado (1978), and the Organizacin de Liberacin Nacional Galicia Ceibe (1979).
Ferrns chivalric stories of Breton inspiration have enjoyed enduring popularity: Percival (1958), where
the author shows himself at his most cunqueirn, and Amor de Artur (1982) are the two best known.
By contrast, his politically driven output continues to be severely understudied due to its uncomfortable
links to radical nationalism. In 2009 he ran for election to the Parlamento de Galicia on the ticket of the
independentist party Frente Popular Galega, which obtained only .17% (that is point seventeen percent)
of the popular vote. To this day he remains the editor of the quarterly journal A Trabe de Ouro. Revista
Galega de Pensamento Crtico (which he founded in 1990) and the guiding light of a neo-avant-garde
group for social and artistic activism called Redes Escarlata, which he launched in 2001.
3. The precarious and fragile Frente Popularthe multi-party left-wing coalition that won the
February 1936 general election during Spains Second Republicwas simultaneously and violently antagonized by some of its constituent parties and by the fascist rebels from the opposite side of the political
spectrum. The controversial thesis that two or more coups dtat happened in hazardous synchronicity
as a Lefortian spectacle of diversity that created the conditions for a transformative event which finally

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brought the plurality of revolution to an endwas circulated in 1976 by influential novelist Juan Benet in
his very short essay Qu fue la guerra civil (11-16). See also Furet (4448) on the transitory convergence
of heterogeneous interests in strategic alliances which retroactively can be made to resemble monolithic
formations. This is in fact a central theme in Ferrns Bretaa, which uses the prospect of a fight to the
death between the two existing ranks of prison guards in Terra Ancha as the contingent occasion for the
launching of an interclass revolution from within the carceral institutions where Tagen Atas radical activists are jailed side by side with the common offenders whom they secretly indoctrinate.
4. See Hallwards Interview with Badiou (12325) for a well-known instance of this formulation,
which reproduces Badious words here given in English and in quotation marks.
5. See Rancires Comunistas sen comunismo? (178), recently published in Mndez Ferrns A Trabe
de Ouro, for an updated view of communismloosely identified with Rancires influential view of
democracyas the subjects future emancipation from his or her minoritized status. This emancipation
is predicated paradoxically on the asymmetrical equality of individual intelligences with a collective intelligence that remains in constant flux; on the heterogeneous and undecided condition of all experiential
forms which give shape to the tensions between domination and emancipation; and on the renunciation
of a fixed and monolithic idea of the future in favor of an infinitude of possible futures whose main lineaments are inaccessible to the subject of equal rights who inhabits the present.
6. As Bakhtin writes about Crime and Punishment, outside a dialogue of conflicting truths taking
place throughout the entire plot of the novel, not a single essential act is realized (Problems 75).
7. Despite the two mens many disagreements, Pieiros Editorial Galaxia published Ferrns novel,
Arrabaldo do norte, in 1964.
8. See Bakhtin, Problems 18, 9197. Specifically, the treatment of each voice and its world as a
dynamic separate totality (a whole) does not erase that voices inner divisions and fluctuations, which
in fact resisting its fragmentary re-elaboration into a function of a greater totality. Ferrns novels do not
end with the full realization of a transformative event that may amount to a resolution. Rather, his stories
come to a halt after the last narrated action in each novels plot is presented: Rotbaf riding into a mythic
forest in Retorno; a massive uprising in Terra Anchas and Tagen Atas prison systems in Bretaa. These
concluding episodes might perhaps affect the recomposition of social relations, but such possibility is not
confirmed in the narrative.
9. The Irmandades de Tagen Ata are an illegal group based on the Partido Galeguista do interior
mentioned above and its expatriate counterpart in Argentina, the pro-guerrilla Irmandade Galega.
10. Pieiros well-known statement, Pra unha filosofa da saudade (1953), consciously downplays the
emphasis laid on objective environmental conditions by scientific Marxism and other materialist philosophies. His interpretation of Galician identity revolves, rather, around the twofold operation of vitalizacin
do Espritohis indirect way of calling for a subjective temporalizing of literatureand espritoalizacin
da Vidahis call for a de-temporalizing of history. In this way the project of identifying the sentimental
singularity [singularidade sentimental] of Galicians takes center stage (36). Beyond this sentimental selfdifferentiation, there would be no room for an authentic Galician identity. The sentiment of saudade or
chronic longing for the affective completion of a lost totality of being overcomes the opposition between
instinctive life [vida instintiva], informed by absolute temporality, and pure rationality [pura racionalidade], informed by absolute intemporality (3637). Since this overcoming involves the crossing into a
higher ontological dimensionso Pieiro claimsit can be construed as the source of Galicians radical,
ontological freedom [libertade radical, ontolxica] (38). By contrast, Pieiros objective reality [realidade
ouxetiva] echoes, as well as denies, the objective conditions of revolutionary action; objective reality predictably becomes for him a space of bondage because in it there is no sentimental intimacy understood
in the sense of inwardness or introspection. He tellingly uses the phrases essential liberty of intimacy/
introspection [libertade esencial da intimidade] and radical inwardness of the being of man [intimidade
radical do ser do home] (3738). This conclusion amounts to a thorough renunciation of direct political
action. Pieiros use of the transparency/ opacity opposition, combined with the rationality/ vitality binomial, may echo Ortega y Gassets aesthetic ideas of the 1910s and earlier 1920s.
11. For other examples of this rhetoric, see Retorno 5960. The obvious subtext of Ulm Roans tirade
is Pieiros bizarre mixture of philosophical clichs in Pra unha filosofa da saudade, which also borrows
freely from Ortega y Gassets and Heideggers more rigorous theorizations in addition to Otero Pedrayos
baroque prose style.
12. This sentence is indebted to Balibar (96100).
13. The episode of Rotbaf confronting Ulm Roan may be based on a series of conversations between
Ferrn and Pieiro (Salgado and Casado 6977).

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J. M. Rodrguez Garca

14. See Le Goff (16878) for a discussion of Chrtien de Troyess Brocliande as a transitional space
of exchange in which courtliness, culture, and savagery are managed symbolically to create a scene of
adventure and initiatory exploits.
15. The last chapter of Arrabaldo contains a long passage (12830) which reads like a parody of
Ramn Otero Pedrayos bucolic writing on rural landscape, itself the embodiment of Galicias literary
ethnonationalism in the early twentieth century.
16. See Albrs 1013. Following Albert Camuss preference for rebellion over revolution, Albrs calls
the authors who focus on both existential alienation and self-interrogation crivains de la rvolte (254).
17. A partial list of the outstanding discrepancies between Tagen Ata and Galicia in 1970 would
include these three. First, while Terra Ancha has recognized Tagen Atas limited autonomous status,
Francos regime is still focused on enforced centralization and homogeneity across the board. Second,
while Rotbaf embodies a romantically radical Galicia Exterior, at that time the expatriate community in
the Americas and in northern Europe had begun to shift to centrist and possibilist positions not unlike
those upheld by Ulm Roan. And third, while azerrata peasants do not own the land they till, their
Galician counterparts are in significant numbers minifundium owners who (in rapidly increasing numbers) work part-time in nearby towns at the same time as they attend to their non-specialty small plots of
land. One of Ferrns frequent critiques of progressive Galician intellectuals from earlier generations
(Castelao is his main example) is that they advanced the notion of a rural nation composed largely of
small-scale land proprietors (a nation of yeomen or paisanos) when in reality much of Galicias peasantry
has historically been a class of destitute subalternscaseiroswho tilled someone elses land.
18. In the early Transition this common anti-statist stance informed the activities of armed-guerrilla
groups and various kinds of libertarian platforms, as well as capitalist lobbies pushing for the end of the
Francoist states monopolies and the deregulation of market exchanges (Daz 15163, esp. 15357).
19. A legal conundrum is created when a maligned sub-state nation rises against a rival nationalistic
platform which it had previously supported in the successful realignment of the existing legal order identified with the state (Schmitt 8384). The dominant force in the earlier uprising may have legalized its
hegemonic position by means of a referendum whereby the legitimacy of right becomes identical with
the legality of the republic. Nonetheless, the contingency of the victors accession to the government of
the state exposes the origin of sovereignty as the decisionistic manipulation of the exception.
20. See Aranguren (2224, 2833) for a stimulating take on this issue.
21. See Gonzlez Gmez (41113), whose words I adapt in English translation and between quotation marks. This critics misunderstanding of fantasys role in the philo-Breton novels comprising la
matire de Tagen Ata arises from a conflation of Ferrns project with those of Cunqueiro and Torrente.
The Galician critics of the early Transition who, following Pieiros lead (he reviewed Retorno in Galaxias
journal, Grial, in 1971), denied Ferrns politically driven work the literary merit accorded to his earlier
work include Csar Antonio Molina, Pilar Vzquez Cuesta, and Carlos Casares. See extracts of opinions in
Gonzlez-Milln 99101, 16567. Besides Pieiros, other adverse and cynical reviews by Anxo Tarro and
Casares are collected in Ramn Nicolss dossier of opinions appended by way of an epilogue to the edition cited in this essay. Favorable commentators featured in the same dossier include Xos Manuel Beiras,
Dolores Vilavedra, Manuel Forcadela, and Anxo Angueira.
22. This paragraph is indebted to Angueira (44754).
23. Jo Labanyi, David Herzberger, ngel Loureiro, and Xon Gonzlez-Milln are among the literary
critics who have devoted important studies to the ongoing tensions in late-Francoist and early-Transition
culture between the writing of histories (whether it is from right-wing, center-right or left-of-center positions) and the counter-historical fictions that variously flaunt their fictionality while exposing the mystifying rhetorical strategies at work in any type of historiographic project.

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