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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
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2013.754235
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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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(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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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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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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J. M. Rodrguez Garca
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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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J. M. Rodrguez Garca
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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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.
WORKS CITED
Albrs, R.-M. Les hommes traqus. Paris: La Nouvelle dition, 1953. Print.
Angueira, Anxo. A espiral no espello. Bretaa, Esmeraldina e o sistema literario
galego. Vigo: Xerais, 2009. Print.
Aranguren, Jos Luis L[pez]. Sobre imagen, identidad y heterodoxia. Madrid: Taurus,
1981. Print.
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