Joan Marsé, Novelist Who Wrote on POUM, Receives Highest Spanish Literary Prize

In furtherance of an ongoing interest in the historiography of the Spanish civil war, I note with delight that the Catalan novelist Joan Marsé, born in Barcelona in 1933, has been awarded Spain’s highest literary honor, the Cervantes Prize.  While I am normally no fan of such distinctions, which are typically empty and serve to corrupt literary life (see my numerous polemics on the Nobel sweepstakes), the 2008 Cervantes for Marsé is a welcome event.  

Marsé remains best known for his novel Si te dicen que caí, written while Spanish dictator Francisco Franco still lived, and translated poorly into English in 1979 as The Fallen.  It deals with the fate of anarchists and militants of the Partit Obrer d’Unificacio Marxista or POUM, in which Orwell served, after the triumph of the Nationalist forces in 1939.  It was made into a splendid movie by Vicente Aranda Ezquerra, a leading Catalan director – self-taught in film art – who was born in 1926 and lived through the civil war.  Aranda is an unabashed sympathizer of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and its active cadre formation, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI).  Paradoxically, however, the first offering in a trilogy of his films about the Spanish war, originally titled, like the novel, Si te dicen que caí, but also released under the title Aventis, was more sympathetic to the POUM.

The film appeared in 1989, 14 years after Franco’s death.   In it, no less a star than Antonio Banderas plays a POUM soldier.  Talk about the revenge of anti-Stalinists in popular memory!  I have often commented gloatingly, when reproached with hero-worship toward Leon Trotsky, that the archenemy of Dzhugashvili ended up portrayed in a film on Frida Kahlo as the lover of the delectable Salma Hayek.  Nobody is going to create such a film role around Friedrich Hayek, or any other 20^th century conservative or Stalinist hero.

Aventis was followed in Aranda’s civil war trilogy by a five-hour series aired in 1990 on Televisión Española (TVE), Los Jinetes del Alba (Riders of the Dawn – hereinafter Jinetes.)  Both films evinced narrow cinema resources and the restriction of many scenes to key actors and interactions between them.  In 1996, however, Aranda produced his spectacular summation (so far) about the war, Libertarias, the epic of six members of the anarchist women’s organization, the Mujeres Libres (Free Women), which was a significant component of the Spanish revolutionary movement.   But Libertarias was also made with the cooperation of the remaining CNT in Spain, and includes magnificent spectacle and crowd scenes in which Aranda brought to life the newsreels and stock images that had electrified the world in 1936.

All three of these works are available in the U.S. on DVD, and I will not spoil the pleasure I hope the interested spectator will enjoy in watching them.  Suffice to say that Aranda’s memory of the Spanish torment is nearly faultless, his vision authentic, and his cinematic touch sure.  His fidelity to the POUM and, even more, the CNT, demonstrates conclusively that inside the Spanish left, regardless of the legends prevalent among Communist-nostalgic foreign intellectuals, the anti-Stalinists have won the battle of historic memory.

In Libertarias, along with Aranda’s other works, there is no temptation to avoid a frank and even brutal eroticism.   Many scenes appear in his films that could never be anticipated in a politically-correct opus like that of the much-overpraised Ken Loach, a leftist producer of television commercials known for his pro-POUM 1995 picture Land and Freedom.  But Aranda’s visions are undeniably Iberian in their reality.   Aranda is a feminist: sexual exploitation and especially prostitution and humiliation appear as repeated and effective themes in Aventis, Jinetes, and Libertarias, along with homosexuality.   So does the trope of the hidden and deformed female soul – in Aventis, a fugitive girl whose identity is ambiguous; in Jinetes a handicapped girl with webbed fingers kept prisoner in a cell.  In Libertarias, we find a nun transformed by anarchism (María, played by a child-like Ariadna Gil – later to perform as the mother in El laberinto del fauno [Eng: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)], written and directed by the Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro, which won Academy Awards  in 2007 for cinematography, art direction, and makeup.   Libertarias also includes an anarchist-spiritualist, Floren, who is lame, with one leg permanently deformed, and is played by the main star of all three films, the doe-eyed, then dark-souled Victoria Abril.  Today Abril is one of Spain’s great film personalities,.    

Aventis, in the title of that film, are juvenile adventures based on rumors, derived from the Catalan slang of Barcelona street children in 1940, the year after Franco’s victory.   But the real topic of Aventis is the universe of debasement imposed on the working class of Barcelona by its catastrophic defeat.  The title of Marsé’s book, If They Tell You I Fell, is drawn from the lyrics of the Falangist anthem Cara al sol, and is obviously satirical, but the content of the work is finally depressing and even shocking.  Both the novel’s translation into English and the currently-available dubbed English DVD version of Aventis miss major elements that only Barcelonese or others who know the city and its revolutionary history intimately would recognize. 

Aventis is told in flashback from the 1970s and 1980s, but is mainly set in 1940, during the Stalin-Hitler pact.  The protagonists, including an anarchist resistance circle, refer repeatedly to “the Chinese” as enemies equal to the Francoists, and even as allied with the latter against the radical resistance.  “Xinesos” in Catalan, or “chinos” in Spanish, was the famous nickname given to Soviet agents in Barcelona by their radical left opponents.  Newsreels in a movie house show Franco meeting with Hitler, and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov parleying with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The film clearly suggests that during the pact the Communists and Francoists cooperated in Spain to hunt down and kill anti-Stalinists – “the Chinese and the fascists have teamed up to kill us, but we’re alive,” an anarchist declares.  

A main theme of both the book and film is the concealment from Falangist police of the POUM combatant Marcos (Banderas).  But Marcos is equally afraid of the “Chinese” – he believes he is still “remembered in the Kremlin.”  References to “the Chinese” would be incomprehensible to a foreign audience, as, even to anti-Stalinists outside Spain, would be brief comments about the involvement of the Soviets in suppressing the May protests of 1937, which were described by Orwell. (Orwell makes a spectral appearance in the original novel.)  So would remarks about the Barcelona working-class district called the “Barri xinès” – “Chinatown” – which was scrubbed clean at the time of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and is now known for its immigrant Muslim population, and to Francoist suppression of Catalan folk dancing. 

In the street, the hidden Marcos is described in the childrens’ “aventis” as a Franco soldier who hid during the revolutionary period and has yet to learn that his side has won, or as a Soviet aviator. But Marcos himself is obsessed by the memory of a young woman, Aurora Nin, played by Abril.  This reference could not but stir the Catalan audience, for Aurora Nin is described as a niece of Andreu Nin (1892-1937), the famous Catalan writer and POUM leader assassinated by the Communists – as mentioned in the film.  Aurora Nin, who also calls herself Ramona, has been reduced to defilement in sex shows and to open prostitution, although pregnant.  The symbolism of Barcelona’s maltreated soul, degraded but fecund with a reborn self-awareness, is obvious and deeply affecting, especially as presented by Abril. 

Marcos is not alone in hunting Aurora Nin – his brother Java, played by Jorge Sanz – who performs with Abril in the other two components of the Aranda civil war trilogy – has been induced to search her out, but must perform sexually with her while watched by a Francoist voyeur with whom she has convoluted links.  Further, various other individuals claim they want to provide for her charitably but clearly seek her for her civil-war past, which is too-briefly depicted.   In an authentic star turn, Abril plays both the young Aurora Nin/Ramona, and an adult prostitute, Menchu, at one point with both at the same bar.  The “aventis” include street-children’s games imitative of Francoist tortures, while the anarchists carry out jewelry thefts and plan other attacks on the regime.  Aurora Nin’s fate as a prostitute explicitly refers, by contrast, to the civil war’s revolutionary effort to end the sex trade among women, and the postwar anarchists raid and rob a whorehouse (a Spanish institution that figures in each of the three films).

No novel or film more eloquently portrays the fidelity of Catalan popular memory to the true history of the POUM in the civil war, after the party was internationally libeled for decades by the Communists as traitors to the Spanish left.  Marsé, Aranda, Abril, the remarkably large number of surviving POUMists and CNT militants, and all the people of Barcelona should be pleased at the award of the 2008 Cervantes Prize.

(This commentary is partly excerpted from a forthcoming article on Spanish civil war cinema, to be published in Film History.)