The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain 0674260104, 9780674260108

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THE OP-ED NOVEL

OP-ED NOVEL

the

A LITERARY HISTORY of

POST-FRANCO SPAIN

BÉCQUER SEGUÍN

Cambridge, Massachusetts  •  London, England 2024

Copyright © 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Publication of this book has been supported through the generous provisions of the Maurice and Lula Bradley Smith Memorial Fund.

Cover art: Map illustration by Alexander Lysenko Cover design by Lisa Roberts 9780674294806 (EPUB) 9780674294813 (PDF) The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Printed Edition as Follows:

Names: Seguín, Bécquer, 1987– author. Title: The Op-Ed novel : a literary history of post-Franco Spain / Bécquer Seguín. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Harvard University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023006854 | ISBN 9780674260108 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: País (Madrid, Spain)—History. | Spanish fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Spanish fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Op-ed pages—Spain—History—20th century. | Op-ed pages—Spain—History—21st century. | Journalism and literature—Spain—History—20th century. | Journalism and literature—Spain—History—21st century. | Spanish literature—Political aspects. Classification: LCC PQ6144 .S44 2023 | DDC 863/.640935846081—dc23/eng/20230606 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006854

A mi padre a la memoria de mi madre y a ilil, Noam y Laro

Contents

Introduction: Literature with an Expiration Date

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1 A Literary History of Opinion Journalism

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2 Anxieties of the Novelist Intellectual

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3 Persuasive Literary Thought

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4 Autofiction and the Uses of History

119

5 The New Novel of Ideas

158

6 Literary Populism

193

Coda: Journalism’s Sonnet

225

Notes 233 Acknowledgments 287 Index 291

THE OP-ED NOVEL

Can we not see that it is works of fiction, after all, however mediocre they may be artistically . . . that best stir political feeling? —Roland Barthes

Introduction

Literature with an Expiration Date

Once you notice it, it’s hard to ignore: novelists are everywhere in the opinion pages of El País, Spain’s paper of record. Of the seventy-five regular opinion writers listed by the newspaper, one-third are professional novelists, and many, from Mario Vargas Llosa to Najat El Hachmi, are weekly columnists.1 Such significant literary representation in the op-ed pages of major global newspapers is uncommon. At the New York Times, for instance, the number of regular opinion writers who are novelists is one in seven.2 At Le Monde, the number is roughly one in ten.3 Since at least the mid-2000s, the Times has not included a novelist among its fifteen regular columnists, not even a one-time novelist. Le Monde fared only slightly better, having published a serialized political novel coauthored by two of its opinion columnists.4 When moving from weekly columnists to regular contributors, the numbers don’t get much better. In a good year, Le Monde might have four regular opinion writers who are also novelists, while the Times might have at most five.5 El País, meanwhile, would likely feature five times that number or more. This begs the question: Why does Spain’s most important newspaper employ so many novelists as opinion columnists? Part of the answer takes us back to the early years of Francisco Franco’s four-decade-long authoritarian dictatorship. In 1938, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Francoist forces began implementing a censorship regime that cut across book and newspaper publishing. The incipient regime passed its first censorship law that April, controlling the appearance of political opinion, religion, sexuality, and languages other 1

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than Spanish by having censors examine books and newspapers before they went to press. The law, which gave censors a wide purview, quickly and dramatically curtailed the circulation of print material in Spain. Journalism and fiction nonetheless took forking paths under this censorship regime. Through a heavy reliance on metaphor, insinuation, and foreign publishing houses, novel writing continued to flourish, albeit circuitously, both inside and outside the country.6 Journalism, by contrast, suffered a far bleaker fate. In regions across Spain, reporting was tightly controlled from the very first months of the Civil War.7 Following the end of the war, the new authoritarian state would subsequently place the press under the control of the interior ministry, which appointed newspaper directors, credentialed journalists, and set national propaganda policy. In 1966, after nearly three decades of strict control, the Franco regime liberalized part of its censorship apparatus with the passage of what is commonly known as the Fraga Law, named after information and tourism minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne. The new law abolished preventive censorship, meaning publishers were no longer required to submit materials in advance of publication to be approved by censors. But it retained political, religious, sexual, and linguistic restrictions, placing the burden directly on newspaper editors and book publishers to adhere to the restrictions or else risk sanctions and criminal prosecution. The regime’s bait and switch on censorship meant that significant changes to journalism would not arrive until the restoration of democracy in the late 1970s.8 This is where our story begins. Shedding four decades of restrictions on publishing, Spain’s transition to democracy breathed new life into journalism and literature. But importantly it brought these two disparate forms of writing together. The proliferation of new newspapers and magazines as well as the democratic revitalization of old ones created a vacuum of column space that suddenly needed to be filled. A young generation of journalists would come to fill most of that column space, but, following the model of Le Monde and other European newspapers, a sizable amount would be reserved for opinion writing. To fill that column space, editors of the newly legalized free press predictably turned to



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politicians and other journalists, but they also turned to literary writers, and novelists in particular. Literary writers, the idea went, might more accurately represent the country’s newfound cultural and political pluralism. If these were some of the historical reasons why novelists began populating Spain’s op-ed pages in the late 1970s, there were also aesthetic ones. During the last years of the Franco dictatorship, a new generation of journalists began cultivating a form of opinion-oriented reporting that went by the name of periodismo informativo de creación (literary news journalism).9 Following the de facto lifting of press restrictions in 1975, newspaper opinion sections would become the laboratory for this new form of experimental writing that combined news, opinion, and literary style. At the same time, this new form legitimated and created readerly appetite for literature-inflected opinion writing. The new generation of young journalists who developed the new form included Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Francisco Umbral, Rosa Montero, and Maruja Torres, all of whom would go on to become some of the most influential voices in post-Franco Spanish opinion journalism. Not surprisingly, these same columnists would also go on to become celebrated novelists. In a matter of decades, the inverse would also become true. A 2004 study of the opinion pages of Spain’s seven leading national newspapers found that literary writers were second only to journalists in the number of columns they wrote. In fact, 16 percent of columnists, the study found, were literary writers, which was more than politicians and university professors combined.10 This book tells the story of a group of novelists in post-Franco Spain who left their mark on column writing. The group includes Antonio Muñoz Molina, Javier Marías, Javier Cercas, Almudena Grandes, and Fernando Aramburu—some of the most renowned Spanish novelists of the post-Franco era. In becoming opinion columnists, these novelists also transformed how they wrote literary fiction. Each of them, in different ways, incorporated into their novels aspects of the argumentative practices they had honed in their column writing. As a result, they saw fiction as a place for settling scores with fellow intellectuals,

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making speculative historical claims, and advancing partisan political projects—as well as testing the limits of genre, form, and style. Antonio Muñoz Molina was the first of the group to become an opinion journalist. Having studied journalism briefly in university, he began writing columns for local newspapers in Granada in the early 1980s, amid Spain’s decade-long transition to democracy. But writing newspaper columns was not his day job. For nearly a decade he worked as a civil servant in Granada’s municipal office, writing columns and drafting novels and short stories after hours. Muñoz Molina’s life changed in 1986, when he published his first novel, Beatus Ille (A Manuscript of Ashes), with the major Catalan publishing house Seix Barral. He left his job as a civil servant shortly after to dedicate his time exclusively to novel writing. His vertiginous novelistic output over the next decade led to correspondingly meteoric rise to literary stardom, during which he won two National Literature Prizes—the Spanish equivalent of a Pulitzer—in a span of four years and was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy, becoming the youngest of the elite institution’s fortysix members. The most internationally renowned member of the group, Javier Marías, was, for many years, the torchbearer of Spanish literature. Born into a well-known scholarly and artistic family in Madrid, he published his first two novels by the time he graduated from university. It would take Marías another two decades, however, to cement his inimitable literary style: long, digressive, and philosophically reflexive prose, punctuated by fleeting moments of action. With this in mind, it seems unlikely he would have been suited to the fast-paced, argumentative form of the op-ed. But by the end of his career, Marías became almost equally wellknown in Spain for his irascible Sunday columns as for his awardwinning novels. During the early days of his journalistic career, his column polemically outed writers and intellectuals who had collaborated with the Franco regime. By the end of his career, the column looked to contravene the habits of Spain’s politically correct public sphere. Of all the writers in the group, Almudena Grandes most wore her political commitments on her sleeve. A Madrid native, she achieved



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literary fame with her first novel, which broke with the Franco-era taboo on sexuality and tackled the themes of teenage eroticism and sexual experimentation head-on. Her career in journalism began less explosively, with a literary column in the El País’s Sunday magazine. Yet halfway through that career, she turned on the literary persona she had created, instead embracing more explicitly political themes in her opinion writing. Her novels soon followed suit. Out went sexuality and other themes that could be pinned on her gender; in came trenchant critiques of Spain’s history, politics, and economics. Regardless of which piece of writing by Grandes one was reading, all came from an avowedly left-wing perspective. Javier Cercas was the group’s, and perhaps Spanish literature’s, enfant terrible. Born in the mountainous region of Extremadura but raised in Catalonia, he began writing novels in the late 1980s, while working as a university professor—mostly at the University of Girona, but also for a short time at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. It was only after he swapped the university campus for the reporting trip in his fourth novel, Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis, 2001), that his unique form of autofiction turned him into an internationally renowned writer. Turning a side career as an opinion writer into the subject of endless novelistic fascination, Cercas used autofiction’s nonfictional veneer to accrue public legitimacy for his political viewpoints, helping cultivate for himself the public intellectual persona of someone who is attracted to counterintuitive ideas. Fernando Aramburu was the last of the group to take up opinion journalism, and the last of the group to reach the heights of literary and intellectual acclaim. Born in San Sebastián, Aramburu left Spain for Germany in 1985, earning a living as a language teacher and writing novels, short stories, and poetry during his spare time. Although, like many of his peers, he published his first opinion pieces in the late 1990s on the heels of novelistic success, he did not immediately become a regular opinion-maker. Over the next decade his op-eds remained few and far between. Everything changed with the publication of Patria (Homeland, 2016), his eighth novel. The novel, which deals with the

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complicated moral and political issue of the Basque conflict, singlehandedly launched a novelist-intellectual career like few others in the history of Spanish literature, leading to more than a dozen prizes, an HBO series, and a weekly column at one of the country’s most widely read newspapers. In fact, in many respects this one novel propelled Aramburu’s recognition as a literary and intellectual authority in Spanish society beyond that of nearly all his peers. Its weighty subject matter, the Basque conflict, has also become a staple of his opinion column, giving him a moral authority unparalleled among novelist intellectuals in Spain. These novelists admittedly make for strange bedfellows. They were not part of a club, nor did they meet regularly at a tertulia to discuss matters of literature and politics. They were rarely seen in public together, and, in fact, many of them didn’t even like each other. Marías once called Muñoz Molina a moralist, a conservative, and a proto censor. Muñoz Molina once insinuated that Grandes had apologized for war crimes. Grandes once suggested Cercas had written a dishonest novel. Muñoz Molina once mocked Cercas for being a snob. Grandes once denounced Muñoz Molina as a demagogue. The list of jibes and accusations goes on. Of the group, Aramburu, it appears, was the only one who seemed to get along with everyone. And even this appearance of congeniality may only be the result of his late arrival to novelist intellectual fame. Besides literary renown, it appears that little else holds this eclectic group of novelists together. They represent an array of distinct literary voices within Spain’s most distinguished class of fiction writers. Stylistically, their novels cut across literary genres, both new and old, from autofiction to historical fiction to detective fiction. Argumentatively, their novels focus on disparate, if not opposing, subjects, from political fanaticism in Aramburu to political deception in Cercas. Yet what unites these writers is that they shared many years, if not decades, working together as columnists for El País. From the 1990s onward, this group of writers helped define what it meant to be both a novelist and an intellectual in Spanish society.



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The Fourth and a Half Estate The phenomenon of literary writers populating the opinion pages of Spain’s newspapers is not new. It has a history that dates back to the turn of the nineteenth century, and this history comprises the other part of the answer to the question of why Spain’s most important newspaper employs so many novelists as opinion columnists. In the early nineteenth century, Spanish newspapers addressed a very narrow, influential, and elite readership simply by virtue of existing as printed text. In 1803, fewer than 6 percent of Spaniards could read.11 At the time, the country was ruled by the absolute monarchy of Charles IV, and its censorship regime meant that newspapers in Spain were prohibited from discussing political matters. They did so, of course, through metaphor, allusion, and other forms of covert literary messaging. In one memorable instance, the late-Enlightenment poet-intellectual Manuel José Quintana attacked his contemporaries by way of Virgil, whom he accused of being “a sycophant of tyrants.”12 The Peninsular War would provide a jolt to the legal landscape of newspaper publishing in Spain. In 1810, the Cortes de Cádiz approved the country’s first freedom of the press laws, which were subsequently enshrined in the liberal Constitution of Cádiz in 1812. However, by the end of 1813, Fernando VII had reestablished an absolutist monarchy, thereby rejecting the Constitution of Cádiz and the press rights it brought with it.13 The critical issue for readers in Spain at the time was not so much determining which newspaper published the most reliable information but rather deciphering which political interests each newspaper served. For the next two decades, suspicion of the press was so extreme that Spanish readers largely perceived literary works as hewing more closely to the truth than periodicals.14 It was in this context that Spain’s literary writers began penning modern opinion columns. The most notable of these writers was Mariano José de Larra, one of the most influential figures of Spanish Romanticism and widely regarded as the father of Spanish columnismo (column writing).15 During the first decades of the nineteenth century,

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Larra forged his style of Romanticism almost exclusively in the press, using newspaper columns to develop his trademark form of literary costumbrismo, a narrative style depicting the customs, local color, and everyday life of a particular region. Larra’s region was Madrid. A writer, journalist, and editor in the Spanish capital, Larra saw Fernando VII’s censorship regime from up close as well as from other important vantages. As a writer and journalist, he pseudonymously penned social criticism in columns for an array of newspapers that included La Revista Española, El Correo de las Damas, El Observador, El Español, El Mundo, and El Redactor General. His columns often used satirical fiction to take aim at everyone from the king to the Cortes Generales, mocking everything from the latent habits of Spaniards to the tics of newspaper editors. As an editor, Larra launched two satirical newspapers during the late 1820s and early 1830s. These papers, El Duende Satírico del Día and El Pobrecito Hablador, briefly provided writers the opportunity to indirectly criticize those in power, as well as the broader social habits that might stem from elite malfeasance.16 The importance of Larra and other Romantic writers in establishing the literary legitimacy of writing for newspapers cannot be overstated. By the mid-nineteenth century, that legitimacy was gaining ground in perhaps the country’s most powerful enclave of academic prestige: the Real Academia Española, or Royal Spanish Academy. In 1845, Joaquín Francisco Pacheco, a lawyer and jurist who had founded the newspaper La Abeja, used his inaugural speech as a member of the Academy to defend the place of journalism in the world of letters. Journalism, he claimed, was an “independent genre” of literature and the “talent of the great writers” had helped the genre mature as an art form.17 Soon he would not be alone. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, writers with one foot in journalism and the other in literature used their induction into the Academy as an opportunity to sing the aesthetic praises of journalistic writing. Nonetheless, if asked whether journalism was literature, the scholar Jorge Miguel Rodríguez Rodríguez has argued, many of these inductees would have answered, “Literature, yes, but of a second order.”18



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This mantra would hold through the end of the century. Late nineteenth-century writers such as Juan Valera, Eugenio Sellés, and Isidoro Fernández Flórez (known as Fernanflor) walked the tightrope of simultaneously defending journalism as well as asserting its artistic inferiority to poetry, drama, and fiction. Journalism, these and other writers argued in their speeches before the Academy, was hampered mostly by the requirement to serially produce writing. Although some writers made the case that the journalism of certain authors could “equal the good works of professional literature,” many of them recognized that journalism was perhaps most ideal for raising a writer’s profile. By the end of the century, Spain’s reading public had grown to 33.45 percent, meaning journalism could serve to popularize a writer’s output better than earlier systems of artistic patronage.19 Furthermore, regular newspaper columns and other kinds of serial contributions might have a knock-on effect, inspiring the swelling reading public to support more traditional genres of literary writing. All of this, they reasoned, would amount to economic stability for literary writers through regular payments and an enlarged public profile.20 As academics in the royal academy consolidated their aesthetic defense of journalism, the role of newspapers in Spanish public life was changing dramatically. Although, for much of the nineteenth century, newspapers had been used as weapons on behalf of political parties, the 1860s and 1870s witnessed the growing independence and professionalization of journalism. By the turn of the twentieth century, newspapers had mostly become trusted daily sources of news and information. Opinion journalism had become regularized. Many of Spain’s literary journalists had embraced and expanded on Larra’s approach to opinion writing. They wrote even more regularly for the press than Larra and his generation had. And they gave it a new name: articulismo (article writing). The literary-journalistic form Larra had helped develop in the early nineteenth century had passed through the hands of the country’s midcentury satirical press before it was taken up, toward the end of the nineteenth century, by late Romantic and Realist writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Carmen de Burgos, whose

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contributions to the press became a central part of their oeuvre. In addition to article writing, some literary writers, such as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, even worked as editors for various papers. Of all the turn-ofthe-century writers, however, it was perhaps Leopoldo Alas “Clarín” who came closest to what we would recognize today as a modern-day newspaper columnist, penning an average of seven columns a month between 1875 and 1901.21 By 1898, the year Spain lost most of its overseas empire as a result of the Spanish-American War, newspapers had become the cornerstone of the Spanish public sphere. Newspapers were so central, in fact, that in 1904 the writer, intellectual, and university rector Miguel de Unamuno complained that his articles in the press were more well-known than any of his books, even his novels.22 The types of publications to which literary intellectuals contributed grew to include not only newspapers and other broadsheet periodicals but also magazines, which flourished especially in Madrid as a result of early twentieth-century tertulias, regular intellectual gatherings typically held at cafés.23 Still, the opinion column dominated as the preferred periodical genre of choice among literary intellectuals. Across three prewar literary generations—the socalled generations of 1898, 1914, and 1927—a number of writers used opinion columns to synthesize intellectual interests as disparate as philosophy, medicine, and poetry, developing a free-flowing style that came to be called ensayismo (essay writing). Perhaps the most famous practitioners of this new essay form were Eugeni d’Ors and José Ortega y Gasset, two of Spain’s first modern intellectuals. In the first decades of the twentieth century, d’Ors, who was based in Barcelona, created a new form of the opinion column called gloses.24 Gloses were a kind of short-form commentary, mostly on current affairs, which often appeared as a sequence of sentence-length paragraphs that read like individual aphorisms. As with an op-ed, gloses were meant to appeal to a wide audience and their political argument sometimes wouldn’t be revealed until the last line. It has been estimated that, over the course of five decades, d’Ors wrote more than 18,000 gloses in Catalan, Spanish, and French.25



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Ortega y Gasset’s contribution to Spanish opinion writing was philosophical. Located in Madrid, Ortega’s articles, unlike d’Ors’s, were explicitly written for the lettered elite. His at times lengthy opinion articles were heavy on claims, argumentation, and moral righteousness, written in the recognizable proposal-laden tone found in many op-eds today. Yet they were also essays in a technical sense: first attempts at testing out new ideas. Ortega’s two most influential books, La España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain, 1921) and La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses, 1930), for instance, originally appeared as articles in the newspaper El Sol. In 1923, following in the footsteps of his parents, who edited and owned the newspaper El Imparcial, Ortega founded his own periodical, the magazine Revista de Occidente. It has been described as his “broadest, most extensively collaborative, most internationalist, and final major periodical.”26 The goal of the magazine was to revitalize Spanish intellectual life following the end of World War I, in part by connecting it to the rest of Europe. The Revista, he wrote in the inaugural issue, ultimately aspired to “reveal the plane of a new architecture on which Western life is being reconstructed.”27 Many decades later, the magazine’s ethos of learned debate would provide Ortega’s son, José Ortega Spottorno, who cofounded the parent company of El País with Jesús de Polanco, an intellectual floor plan for the opinion pages of his new paper.28 During this period of generic effervescence, the opinion column also often became a parody of itself. Manuel Chaves Nogales, a respected columnist and a novelist, lamented the sophomoric approach to column writing that had taken hold during the interwar period. For Chaves Nogales, reporting was the cornerstone of journalism, and reporting was best communicated through narrative rather than argumentative writing. Reporting meant traveling, talking to strangers, falling into unpredictable or uncomfortable situations. Yet many columnists, he observed, sat at their desks and scrutinized the news at a remove from its sources and context. Chaves Nogales had little patience for the “classical columnist who every morning stands on his soapbox and speechifies at his own whim.” These writers, he argued, “do not have anything

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to do with the newspaper,” because, instead of reporting, “they pull articles out of their heads on all that is divine or human.”29 The further professionalization of journalism over the course of the twentieth century put a squeeze on individual voice and persuasive writing.30 However, as Spain began its transition to democracy, many young journalists at El País, Diario 16, and other newly established papers came to reject Chaves Nogales’s critique of opinion journalism. After four decades of Francoism, the problem was not so much that opinion writing lacked an empirical basis but rather that it lacked any original opinion at all.

What Is a Novelist Intellectual? Who were these new opinion writers? And what was their connection to literature? On January 6, 1983, Francisco Ayala, one of Spain’s foremost twentieth-century novelists, decided to pose these very questions in an op-ed for El País. “What is a novelist intellectual?” he asked, identifying a new figure in the Spanish intellectual landscape. Both a renowned novelist and respected intellectual, Ayala was well positioned to inquire about this new figure. Often considered the last member of the so-called Generation of ’27, which included Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre, Ayala had returned to Spain just a few years earlier, in 1976, after nearly four decades in exile following the Spanish Civil War. By 1983, he was at the height of his intellectual influence. Later that year, the second volume of his three-volume memoir, Recuerdos y olvidos (Memories and oblivions), would go on to win Spain’s prestigious National Literature Prize. Ayala answered the question the only way he knew how: by going to the text. Rather than examine the figure of the novelist intellectual, he wanted to see whether there was anything distinctive about the works of authors who had been labeled novelist intellectuals, either because they were intellectuals who had written a novel or because they were novelists who had become famous for their ideas. He focused on three novelist intellectuals in particular: Benito Pérez Galdós, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith and Galdós sat at either



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extreme. Galbraith was a renowned economist who happened to have written a satirical novel about American foreign policy in Latin America. Galdós, by contrast, one of the most important Spanish novelists of the nineteenth century, happened to have written novels that critics would later call “novels of ideas.”31 For Ayala, however, neither Galdós nor Galbraith was a novelist intellectual. As he explained, novels by novelist intellectuals were instead ones like those by Sartre: “imaginative, authentically poetic works, in which [the intellectual’s] thought— even rigorous, systematic forms of thought—appears efficiently embodied in fictional characters.” Without that embodiment, “the individuality of the author, with their system of ideas,” Ayala continued, “prevails upon the eyes of their readers thanks to the imaginary reality it evokes, such that their work does not achieve the autonomy necessary to capture the reader emotionally and completely absorb them in the work.”32 A true novelist intellectual, in other words, was a rare breed: ideas by novelists seldom reached widespread acclaim, and very few intellectuals could fully suppress their tendency toward argumentative writing, even in their literary works. Ayala wrote the op-ed as an homage to the Argentinian writer Eduardo Mallea, who had died just weeks earlier. For much of his career, Mallea had allegedly been disparaged as a novelist intellectual—that is, as neither a true novelist nor a true intellectual but as an inadequate mixture of the two. Something similar had happened to Ayala himself. The question of what a novelist intellectual is, he wrote, “was a question I had asked myself repeatedly, since the label ‘novelist intellectual’ has often been applied to my own work—which, at bottom, is an attempt to discredit it. The move reflects a common feature of our times, in which anything that aspires to some kind of distinction is considered antidemocratic.”33 Ayala was going against the zeitgeist, arguing that, in some sense, all novelists were intellectuals and all novels were novels of ideas, even if they didn’t perform the social function of intellectuals or novels of ideas. What novelists thought about the social function of their novels had, for Ayala, a seismic impact on how they wrote them, including which aesthetic features they decided to use.

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At around the same time, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze worried the emergence of this new figure of the novelist intellectual might help opinion journalism cannibalize other sectors of culture. In an interview for the French literary magazine L’Autre Journal in 1985, he ventured to suggest that “maybe journalists are partly responsible for this crisis in literature.” By journalists, he was referring specifically to opinion journalists. And by opinion journalists, he was thinking specifically about how, after the mid-1970s, the generation of the nouveaux philosophes, which included Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, and Alain Finkielkraut, among others, had inaugurated a wholesale change to the French intellectual landscape, devaluing the philosophical profession in the process. “We may congratulate ourselves on the quantitative increase in books, and larger print runs,” he said, “but younger writers will end up molded in a literary space that leaves them no possibility of creating anything.” According to Deleuze, the literary market was being crowded out and made homogeneous—a phenomenon that was driven, he claimed, by the myriad best sellers written by nouveau philosophe intellectuals. Their magnetic prose, sweeping arguments, and constant output had caused a paradigm shift in the publishing industry and literary community alike. “The situation affects all writers: any writer [now] has to make himself and his work journalistic,” Deleuze wrote. “In the extreme case everything takes place between a journalist author and a journalist critic, the book being only a link between them and hardly needing to exist.”34 Whether opinion journalism had, by the mid-1980s, caused a crisis in literature—or whether this supposed crisis in literature had existed at all—is debatable. What is perhaps less debatable is that novelists were intertwining their fictional and nonfictional writing in ways that were not yet fully understood. In Spain, this intertwining of column- and fiction-writing has been especially intense since the 1990s. The novelists studied in this book, in particular, have practiced forms of column- and fiction-writing—some new, some old—that have blurred the boundary between two genres. They have often seen their columns as extensions of their novels, and



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their novels as column-writing by other means, each genre serving the particular needs of its newspaper- or fiction-reading audiences. Today, newspaper audiences are numerous but ephemeral. Although circulation numbers for Spain’s major national newspapers hover in the low hundred-thousands, a weekly column from an established novelist might only net only a fraction of those readers. Yet those perhaps tens of thousands of readers might come back regularly, week after week. Once casual or one-time readers are added to the mix, an established newspaper columnist in Spain can, over the course of the several years it takes to write a novel, reach a rather broad audience, even if in a fractured way.35 Fiction audiences, by contrast, tend to be small yet enduring. Despite Spain’s limited culture of book reading, today’s bestselling literary fiction can reach a significant audience, comparable even to that of an opinion column. Novelist intellectuals in particular regularly appear on bestsellers lists of not only literary fiction, but books in general.36 This is especially true of the group of novelist intellectuals studied in this book. These writers have published some of the widest circulating works of contemporary Spanish fiction, perhaps exceeding the readership of several years’ worth of columns. They include Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina, Almudena Grandes’s El corazón helado (The Frozen Heart, 2007), and the three volumes of Javier Marías’s Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow, 2002–2007), which have reportedly sold over one million, 700,000, and 450,000 worldwide copies, respectively.37 To these figures we might also add the experiential gulf between the two genres. It takes several minutes and usually not a significant amount of attention to read an op-ed. Reading a novel takes hours of emotional, intellectual, and physical investment. This difference stems from the purpose of each genre: while the op-ed’s pithiness gives it the flexibility to keep pace with the ever-quickening information cycle, making it one of the most ephemeral of prose genres, the novel is engineered to escape that cycle and have a very long life across generations of readers who may or may not be knowledgeable about its social, historical, or political context.

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Yet, as we will see throughout this book, the persuasive ends of both novels and op-eds, for these novelist intellectuals, often remain strikingly similar. Some of the novels analyzed in this book further develop political claims first introduced in the author’s op-ed. Others test political arguments that will be subsequently defended in the author’s opinion writing. Some of the novels shape public exchanges among intellectuals, academics, and other elites around a particular topic. Others are shaped by public criticism of an author’s public exchanges. In these and other cases, novel- and opinion-writing remain inextricable. Observers who fail to recognize this risk a limited understanding not only of the ends to which certain contemporary novels are being put, but also of the changing role of the novelist in public life. Today, scholars and critics generally treat fiction and opinion journalism as opposing genres of writing. They have come to think that if literature is politically persuasive at all, it is because it asks questions and complicates existing assumptions. Novels that explicitly advocate certain political views risk becoming artless dogmatism. Opinions are anchored in certainty and conviction while “fiction,” the critic James Wood has argued, “moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie, knows that at any moment it might fail to make its case. Belief in fiction is always belief ‘as if.’”38 It is this fundamental difference that is said to prevent fiction from being politically persuasive in the same way as political speech. Any work that, like an opinion column, sets out “to communicate an unambiguous, virtually exhortative message,” the scholar Susan Suleiman writes, risks “authoritarianism” by becoming “pure propaganda without art.”39 At earlier moments in literary history, novels that fell into this trap of political persuasion were termed the social problem novel, the roman à thèse, or the novela de tesis. Across a number of literary traditions, such novels have accordingly been ignored or marginalized. In the study of Spanish literature, scholars almost by default treat a novelist’s nonfictional writing separately from their fictional works, operating under the tacit assumption that it would be inappropriate to treat fiction and nonfiction together. Even scholars who study the



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opinion journalism of Spanish novelists adhere to this incompatibility thesis.40 This book challenges the notion that opinion journalism and fiction are incompatible on both historical and theoretical grounds. Historically, opinion journalism and literature in Spain have shared a harmonious relationship since the advent of mass-market newspapers in the early nineteenth century. So harmonious, in fact, that the country’s foremost practitioner of the modern newspaper column, Mariano José de Larra, was also one of the most canonical figures of Spanish Romanticism. In the present, the relationship between opinion journa­ lism and novel writing is cozier still. Since the op-ed formalized modern opinion writing in the 1970s, fiction has made use of the argumentative strategies of opinion journalism. This book is an attempt to explain the nature of this generic coziness. Yet, as long as the fictional and nonfictional parts of a writer’s oeuvre are considered separately, these argumentative strategies will remain imperceptible. The theoretical approach of this book is to bring these two genres together. Reading novels and op-eds alongside one another reveals how some novels blend narrative and nonfictional evidence to make political arguments, borrowing features of opinion journalism to trouble the fiction-nonfiction divide. These are what I call “op-ed novels.” Some novels are op-ed novels in their genesis: they novelize a writer’s op-ed or are in some way made from the raw materials of opinion journalism. Other novels qualify because they extend a writer’s opinion journalism into the fictional realm. In some cases, novelist intellectuals might even expect real-world consequences to result from revelations or claims made in their fiction. In addition to the benefits of a potentially wider audience, novels can also function as a preserving agent for political arguments. They can more readily license speculative claims, leaving half-baked implications, insinuations, and suggestions in the hands of readers rather than fully fleshing them out. In some cases, opining on current affairs between the covers of a novel leads to the peculiar situation in which a writer feels compelled to openly defend the nonfictional aspects of their fictional work, as if failing to do so would tarnish their standing as a public intellectual. Such possibilities mean that reading

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only the novels or only the opinion writing of novelist intellectuals— rather than both, together—reveals only half the story. Some critics have caught onto the persuasive ends of certain twentyfirst-century novels. Reviewing the final volume of the French writer Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex series, one reviewer found “the novel’s real energy” to be “somewhere between contrarian op-ed and off-colour standup.”41 Writing about the latest David Eggers novel, another critic asked: “Did Eggers mean to write an op-ed, instead of a novel?”42 Still another review, this time of a Richard Powers novel, was less coy about the work’s aesthetic claim. As its title lay bare, the review considered the novel nothing less than “An Op-Ed Essay Masquerading as a Novel.” “Good novels,” the piece warned, “are rarely built on good intentions or politics.”43 This book develops the idea that op-eds can masquerade as novels. But perhaps not in the ways imagined by these critics. Novelist intellectuals have written across genres, but three literary modes in particular stand out for their ability to achieve political persuasion: autofiction, the novel of ideas, and literary populism—a new kind of fiction writing that attempts to pass compositional balance for ideological impartiality. Novelists within and outside of Spain have used these three forms in different ways to complicate the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Examining these forms helps us understand, for instance, why some novelists feel attacked when their fictional work is criticized for nonfictional reasons, such as fudging the historical record or making a shoddy argument. Other novelists might respond by pointing out that the work is a work of fiction; writers of op-ed novels, however, often do not. Once we think of these literary forms as opinion journalism by other means, we begin to see how writers become aesthetically and intellectually wedded to the fiction-nonfiction divide. Attending to this divide is especially important. As we will see throughout this book, it has for years shielded certain novelist intellectuals from public criticism for their political opinions. These novelists have claimed the nonfiction value of their work when they have deemed it expedient to do so, such as



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when they defend the historical accuracy of their historical fiction. Yet they have also claimed the fictional purity of their work when it has suited them, denying the factual accuracy of their writing, or the need to be factually accurate at all, on the grounds that their writing is merely fiction. Novelist intellectuals have long moved between these extremes in both fiction and nonfiction writing, blurring what are clearly works of fiction with opinion writing that might be held to certain journalistic standards. What licenses this confusion—and allows authors to play both sides of the divide—is the closeness of their fiction to nonfiction. Reading fiction and nonfiction together, however, doesn’t mean treating these two forms of writing as being one and the same. Nor does it mean returning to biographical criticism, a practice Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and many others warned against long ago.44 Fiction and nonfiction are different kinds of prose writing, each with its own aesthetic, narrative, and verisimilar features.45 Treating them identically would be nonsensical and counterproductive. Yet reading for argument, as though a novel had similar aims to those of an op-ed, expands the amount of information relevant for understanding a work of fiction: not only the national and global contexts of current affairs but also how the creative capacities of literary genres and forms can be wielded for rhetorical, evidentiary, and other argumentative purposes. Fiction is distinct from but compatible with nonfiction, just as real-world events can meaningfully shape a novel but cannot exhaust our understanding of it. While many philosophers from György Lukács to Jacques Rancière have viewed the politics of literature as internal to literature itself, this book sees the politics of literature as also being external. The existence of the op-ed novel suggests as much. Put differently, this book attempts to identify how writers use their novels as vehicles for real-world political debates in a direct way. Herein lies the book’s distinct and unconventional approach to the politics of aesthetics. Literary works, not unlike works of history, policy papers, or speeches at a rally, can make public claims on current affairs and can do so beyond the context of literary history. Yet op-ed novels are not indifferent to their aesthetic

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form. Far from it. In fact, their aesthetic understanding is why so many of today’s social problem novels no longer register as dogmatic, propagandistic, or didactic, but rather as self-reflexive, complex, and even politically ambiguous. Consider Panashe Chigumadzi’s novel Sweet Medicine (2015), which revisits Zimbabwe’s IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs of the 1990s in the context of the 2008 global financial crisis. The novel is cut from the same cloth as Chigumadzi’s regular op-eds on Zimbabwean politics, yet it wears its politics lightly and appears to have avoided accusations of propaganda. The same is true of the Austrian writer Robert Menasse’s satirical novel Die Hauptstadt (The Capital, 2017), which is about cultural bureaucrats at the European Union in Brussels. Thanks to layers of irony, the novel has been read as self-reflexive and ambiguous in its criticisms of the EU, even though readers of Menasse’s nonfiction will know exactly where he stands.46 Identifying how these and many other novels blend fiction and opinion makes us alive to forms of political persuasion that often go overlooked across the field of contemporary literature. The public life of novels has long been a topic of interest for sociologists of literature. Some sociologists have studied the life of a novel from conception to reception and how, through its transformation into a meaningful social object, a novel can become a global classic.47 Others have attended to those most influential in the reception of a novel, including book reviewers and elites who play a role in the construction of national literary canons.48 Still other literary sociologists have studied the often-overlooked factors of race and gender in literary canonization.49 Yet by and large, sociological approaches to literature have focused on the mechanisms by which literature is valued in culture and society at large. Few have focused on the figure of the novelist. Fewer still have sought to understand how novelists might fit into the role of the intellectual. Just as sociologists of literature have overlooked the figure of the intellectual, sociologists of intellectuals have similarly failed to make room for the novelist. For Julien Benda, perhaps the first modern sociologist of intellectuals, novelists were just intellectuals “whose



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interests are set outside the practical world.”50 Antonio Gramsci, meanwhile, argued that “the man of letters [or] the artist” simply represented “the traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual,” a figure that had to be overcome so as to better understand how each class formed its own intellectuals with technical expertise rather than general opinions.51 Of all the classical sociologists of intellectuals, it was perhaps Karl Mannheim who best understood the position of fiction writers within the intellectual class. In peacetime, he argued, artists “will become aesthetes dedicated to the cult of l’art pour l’art.” Yet “during periods of acute social conflict . . . the artist may respond by becoming politicized and adopting the belief that only ‘socially significant’ art is good art.”52 Like any intellectual who was not entirely economically self-sufficient, novelists, too, were not immune from having to make compromises in times of crisis. Although many novelists, from Émile Zola and André Malraux to James Baldwin and Mary McCarthy, have had their due as major intellectual figures, seldom have scholars accounted for the fact that fiction cannot be treated as the same kind of intellectual output as nonfiction. Classical accounts of the intellectual often placed novelists in the general category of belletrists, if they included them at all. Yet there are belletrists, and there are writers of fiction. The two may be alike in economic class, level of education, and status in society; they differ, however, in their primary medium of intellectual activity. The labor of these lettered elites across classical sociological accounts of intellectuals therefore remains troublingly undifferentiated. A similar failure to distinguish between genres of intellectual labor occurs in more contemporary accounts of the intellectual. In the 1970s, Michel Foucault modified Gramsci’s theory to argue that what was important about organic intellectuals, whom he called “specific intellectuals,” was not so much the particular social group they represented but rather how they might have revealed otherwise veiled aspects of the particular regimes of power to which they were subject and of which they were instruments.53 Yet the medium through which intellectuals “revealed” those regimes of power was assumed to be self-evident;

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whether they did so through fiction or nonfiction presumably made no difference to the analysis. As we will see throughout this book, however, how intellectuals move between fiction and nonfiction is of fundamental importance for understanding the political claims they make in the public sphere. Perhaps the best example of this shortcoming is to be found in the work of Edward Said. During his 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC, Said proposed a theory of the intellectual that placed novelists front and center. Drawing on the works of writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, and V. S. Naipaul, Said challenged many of classical sociological definitions of the intellectual. For him, Benda’s conception of the intellectual as a small group of morally and intellectually superior visionaries was too narrow. Meanwhile, Gramsci’s idea that, while everyone was an intellectual, only a select few performed the role’s social function, was, he argued, too broad. Attempting to find a middle ground, Said defined the intellectual as “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.”54 To make his case, he used an extended catalog of literary examples, from Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ultimately, he argued, novels “serve the purpose . . . of showing us intellectuals in action.”55 Said’s analysis, however, remained untroubled by the fictional vehicle itself. “It is in modern public life seen as a novel or drama and not as a business or as the raw material for a sociological monograph,” Said argues, “that we can most readily see and understand how it is that intellectuals are representative, not just of some subterranean or large social movement, but of a quite peculiar, even abrasive style of life and social performance that is uniquely theirs.”56 For Said, novels offered the clearest picture of how an intellectual operated, but the way that picture worked was assumed to be uncomplicatedly reflective. Novels illustrated what intellectuals did; they were not themselves, however, instruments of argumentation. Merely another portrait of society, novels, in Said’s account, were in no way akin to an op-ed. Only when the authors



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of those novels turned to nonfiction were their political opinions worthy of analysis as political arguments. Said’s lack of attention to the specificity of fiction was by no means unique. This blind spot could be found in even the most well-known and widely cited sociologist among literary scholars: Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s sociology of literature, captured in studies such as Rules of Art (1992) or collections such as The Field of Cultural Production (1993), underscores the cross-pollination between intellectuals and novelists. Yet his account still mostly elides the distinction between an intellectual’s fiction and nonfiction writing. If novelists have ever held any sway over public opinion, and not just cultural taste, their written interventions into public life, according to Bourdieu’s and other structuralist theories of the intellectual, have occurred primarily or even exclusively through the form of nonfiction. Their fiction, by contrast, is only representative of intellectual life, not truly part of it. The figure of the novelist intellectual poses an important dilemma for literary scholars. How, exactly, should we read the novels of a writer whose art betrays the unmistakable influence of their op-eds? Precious little attention has been given to understanding the figure of the novelist intellectual—that is, to how novelists make both fictional and nonfictional contributions to the public sphere under the auspices of a single persona. Seeing how literary figures can appear in society under multiple registers at once—as novelists and as intellectuals—might compel us to reconceptualize how we approach the sociology of intellectuals and the sociology of literature altogether. If one aim of this book is to identify how literary persuasion works in op-ed novels, another is to understand who, today, across the global contemporary literary scene, counts as an intellectual.

Price per Word Beyond Spain, the phenomenon of the novelist-opinion journalist, too, has a long history.57 Though it might be too anachronistic to trace this history back to Daniel Defoe, in English literature one might think of

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G. K. Chesterton, for example, as someone who, at the turn of the twentieth century, worked simultaneously as a newspaper columnist and a novelist but who, for the most part, lived off of his journalism.58 In French literature, one might think of Stendhal and Honoré de Balzac, as well as other nineteenth-century writers such as Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules Vallès, Léon Bloy, and Octave Mirbeau, all of whom wrote for the press, some with regular columns.59 In American literature, one might think of Langston Hughes, one of the founding figures of the Harlem Renaissance who also wrote a regular column for The Chicago Defender from 1942 to 1962.60 This history extends to many other writers across dozens of other countries, revealing just how widespread, if rare, the phenomenon of the novelist-newspaper columnist has been.61 Fast-forward to the present and a similar pattern emerges. During the 1970s, Leung Ping-kwan, better known as Yesi, one of Hong Kong’s most well-known writers, worked as an editor and columnist for magazines and local newspapers before writing fiction. The same was true of Isabel Allende, who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, years before publishing her first novel, began her writing career as a columnist for the magazine Paula. Since the early 2000s, the Nigerian writer Okey Ndibe has maintained a high profile as both a columnist and novelist. So, too, has the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, who has been a newspaper columnist for Le quotidien d’Oran since the mid-1990s.62 In fact, Daoud’s literary writing is so closely related to his opinion journalism that it is said to have been “born out of a newspaper column.”63 The same might also be said today of Christine Angot, perhaps France’s best-known writer of autofiction, who later in her career became a regular opinion writer for Libération and political commentator on French television.64 This list is by no means exhaustive. Indeed, many more novelists across the globe who have practiced column-writing could be cited in their stead.65 Yet it is also important not to overstate the numbers: the amount of novelists today who have also been opinion columnists is still comparatively small. One of the most established and influential traditions of novelist intellectuals undoubtedly comes from Latin America. From Mexico to



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Cuba, from Argentina to Peru, opinion journalism and literary writing have shared a deep, interconnected history.66 To glimpse this history, one needn’t look any further than Mario Vargas Llosa, who has written a bimonthly column for Spain’s El País since 1990 and could have seamlessly fit in the group of novelist intellectuals studied in this book. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Vargas Llosa’s fellow Latin American Boom writer, Tomás Eloy Martínez, was simultaneously a newspaper man and a well-known literary writer, working as an editor for various newspapers and magazines before ultimately finishing his career as a columnist for La Nación, Argentina’s paper of record. Meanwhile, another major figure of the Boom, the Chilean novelist José Donoso, developed the idea for his novel El lugar sin límites (Hell Has No Limits, 1966) while writing a weekly column for the magazine Ercilla. Something similar happened in the early 1950s with Gabriel García Márquez, who worked as a pseudonymous columnist for the Colombian daily El Heraldo well before writing Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). Younger generations of Latin American novelists have continued the tradition of column-writing. Before becoming perhaps Colombia’s most renowned living novelist, Juan Gabriel Vásquez wrote a regular column for El Espectador, the country’s oldest newspaper. Today, he writes a regular column alongside Vargas Llosa for El País. One key difference between the reality of today’s novelist intellectuals and that of Hughes, Chesterton, or Stendhal is the economics of writing. In the early nineteenth century, novelists wrote for newspapers, but practically none could make a living solely from writing fiction. Many major figures of the period across European literature, from Lord Byron to Charles Baudelaire, relied on family wealth or inheritance to support their careers in fiction. A smaller number of writers worked day jobs unrelated to writing, such as Novalis, who, in his short life, was an actuary and magistrate, or Anthony Trollope, who spent more than three decades working for the post office. In Spain, the exception was Larra, who came from a middle-class, professional family but nonetheless needed to support himself primarily through writing.67 The advent of the serial novel changed the economic calculus for many writers. The new publishing model proved wildly profitable for

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writers, newspapers, and publishers alike. Thanks largely to the serial novel, from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, fiction writing could also be a profession. Yet for practically the entire twentieth century, the profession, such as it was, was limited to a very small group of celebrity authors, whose advances, royalties, and commissions associated with fiction writing placed them in an elite, self-sustaining club. For most novelists, aspirations of professionalism remained out of reach. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, many writers turned to the press for financial stability.68 Though they might not have been professional novelists by the letter of the law, they were nonetheless professional writers through and through. As one member of the Royal Spanish Academy said in an attempt to justify this dual career, journalism was literature with an expiration date.69 If one difference is the economics of writing, another is the evolution of opinion journalism. At the turn of the twentieth century, most newspapers resembled journals of opinion with fluctuating degrees of accuracy in reporting. Journalism, as a profession, largely lacked established norms about what constituted a news article or an opinion column. In 1920, the journalist Walter Lippmann set out to change the state of affairs by orienting the profession toward emerging fields in the social sciences. “[Public] opinion,” he argued in his book Liberty and the News, “could be made at once free and enlightening only by transferring our interest from ‘opinion’ to the objective realities from which it springs.”70 During the interwar and immediate postwar periods, journalists in the United States and across the world adopted a number of social-scientific techniques that have today become standard practice: openly naming and attributing sources, fact-checking, separating the advertising and editorial branches of the newspaper, relying heavily on credentialed experts, and rejecting bribes and quid pro quo. Taken together, these techniques are what we have come to identify as journalistic objectivity. What is often overlooked in this shift is that, in the view of Lippmann and other advocates of journalistic objectivity, the new social-scientific approach was ultimately about



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shaping opinion, not news. Its primary target was not the news desk so much as the editorial office. Editorial pages, after all, had been responsible for some of the most widely circulating opinions of the time. Thus, any opinion worth its column space, Lippmann believed, ought to be grounded in the scientifically rendered information available on the news page.71 The professionalization of literary writing, on the one hand, and the social-scientific turn in journalism, on the other, meaningfully altered the conditions enjoyed by today’s novelist intellectuals. Yet, in Spain and elsewhere, the current economics of writing in some respects resembles that of the early nineteenth century.72 Like their early nineteenth-century counterparts, the vast majority of novelists today cannot rely on fiction writing alone for their income. Many receive support from their well-off families, and many more juggle multiple income streams, which may not necessarily involve their writerly talents. A 2019 survey conducted by Spain’s national writers’ association found only one in every six writers earned a living exclusively from writing books, with more than three-quarters of writers earning less in yearly royalties than the country’s monthly minimum wage.73 The situation in the United States and the United Kingdom is not much better.74 Yet there remain important differences. In the United States, growing book advances and the proliferation of master of fine arts programs since the 1980s have made life for middle-income novelists more economically tenable than it ever was before.75 In Spain, no such equivalents exist. Though book advances have increased, conglomerates have not spread their bets on young or first-time authors as equitably as they have in the United States. Master’s degree programs have proliferated across Spanish universities, yet the employment opportunities for graduates en masse remain weak. Nearly all of the novelists from the group studied in this book began writing for newspapers in Spain at a time when it was difficult yet still possible to do without other sources of income.76 Today, that possibility has all but vanished: nearly one in every three journalists is a freelancer, and nearly two-thirds of freelancers earn in the bottom half of all

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Spanish incomes.77 These figures hold true even among the Spanish papers with the highest budgets and cultural capital.78 No wonder so many novelist intellectuals of earlier generations have held onto perches atop the media landscape: regular columns at Spain’s national newspapers remain lucrative gigs.79 Add this to other sources of income— royalties, advances, speaking fees, teaching salaries, consultancy fees, and other commissions—and Spain’s novelist intellectuals rank among the highest-earning salaried professionals in the country. Along with economic stability for select novelist intellectuals, the gatekeeping function of newspapers has also persisted. A newspaper such as El País still has the cultural prestige and economic connections to anoint novelist intellectuals. The distinction between prestige and connections, however, is not always clear. Since its founding in 1972, Prisa, El País’s parent company, has had a very close relationship with a number of renowned publishing houses, Alfaguara most prominently among them.80 Scholars and critics have for years drawn attention to the number of Alfaguara writers who have figured regularly in the El País opinion pages.81 This has created what some observers have called a triangle of mutual benefit between El País, Alfaguara, and Prisa. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this conflict of interest came to a head when a pair of novelist intellectuals associated with rival publishing house Planeta, Juan Manuel de Prada and Fernando Sánchez Dragó, accused Spain’s Ministry of Culture of favoring Alfaguara authors in their selection for the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico.82 The controversy blanketed the pages of El Mundo, ABC, and El País for weeks. Since then, criticisms of gatekeeping have moved beyond questions of newspaper-specific horse-trading. Some scholars have examined the economic feedback loop between opinion columns and fiction writing, claiming that novelists who write opinion columns do so for the purpose of advertising their fiction writing.83 This is to overstate the case. There are many easier and more effective ways to advertise books than writing a weekly opinion column. Still, the exclusivity of op-ed columns at national dailies is undeniable, making the odds of becoming a novelist intellectual of any renown akin to winning the lottery.



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The exclusivity of op-ed columns helps explain why it appears to observers of the Spanish public sphere that many of the country’s novelist intellectuals have overstayed their welcome. These novelists began their journalistic careers with a vision of what they set out to accomplish with their columns. For someone like Antonio Muñoz Molina, that vision was, in part, pedagogical: to expand the literary and cultural palette of readers by introducing them to new artists and artworks from across the globe. For someone like Javier Marías, that vision was historical: to remind readers that following government policy on the memory of Francoist Spain has its consequences. For many of Spain’s novelist intellectuals, however, these visionary beginnings have today run out of steam. The driving purpose behind their columns no longer seems clear. What remains, according to the scholar Ignacio SánchezCuenca, are “apodictic and rash judgments on complex subjects.”84 Attempting to find out whether this perception is accurate and why it exists at all are some of the inquiries that drive this book. In order to pursue them, however, we must be prepared to soften the generic boun­ daries we often erect between seemingly opposed genres and overcome our longstanding reticence to considering the nonfictional author alongside their fictional prose.

The Structure The Op-Ed Novel is divided into two parts, each of which examines how, over the past four decades, a number of Spain’s most recognizable novelist intellectuals have simultaneously traversed the terrains of novel writing and column writing. The opening chapter lays the historical groundwork for the book, providing a history of literary writers in the opinion pages of El País from the paper’s founding in 1976 to the present. Each of the next two chapters examines a paradigmatic career arc of the novelist intellectual: the newspaper columnist who then becomes a novelist, and the novelist who then becomes a newspaper columnist. The key figure of Chapter 2 is Antonio Muñoz Molina, who is emblematic of the first kind of career arc. Covering his novelistic and intellectual

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career from his opinion columns for the Diario de Granada in the early 1980s through his 1987 breakout novel El invierno en Lisboa (Winter in Lisbon) and up to his 2014 historical novel Como la sombra que se va (Like a Fading Shadow), this chapter shows how Muñoz Molina’s meteoric rise to literary celebrity would be unthinkable without his career as a columnist. Javier Marías, the subject of Chapter 3, is emblematic of the novelist who then becomes a newspaper columnist. Focusing on his idea of “literary thought,” which he borrowed from his father, the philosopher Julián Marías, the chapter reveals how Marías’s literary writ­ing became saturated with opinion journalism. His novels, in many respects, were opinion journalism by other means, most notably when he publicly outed writers who collaborated with the Franco regime in his three-volume magnum opus Tu rostro mañana. The second part of the book shifts gears to focus on the embrace of specific literary modes by novelist intellectuals. Each of the final three chapters examines one of these modes—autofiction, the novel of ideas, and literary populism—to show how, in unique ways, they license novelist intellectuals to blend fiction and nonfiction for persuasive ends. The subject of Chapter 4 is Javier Cercas and his use of autofiction in historically oriented novels such as Soldados de Salamina and Anatomía de un instante (The Anatomy of a Moment, 2009). The chapter examines how such novels blur the distinction between journalism and fiction, ultimately providing fictional cover for speculative historical claims. It also documents the influence op-ed page polemics can have on the evolution of an author’s fiction writing. Chapter 5 studies the reemergence in the twenty-first century of the nineteenth-century novel of ideas. It centers on Almudena Grandes, whose polemical political style in both fiction and journalism bucks the mantra in both fields of “show, don’t tell.” The final chapter argues for the existence of a new mode I call “literary populism.” Centering on Fernando Aramburu and his acclaimed novel Patria, the chapter develops an account of novels that borrow journalistic strategies to depict “real people,” paint society as Manichean, and turn nuanced political issues into black-and-white moral decisions. This strategy, which is present in novels from Spain and



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elsewhere, wields journalistic balance to present a partisan view of political conflict. One important feature of the novels analyzed in this book is that many are their author’s magnum opus. Perhaps some will object to my decision to focus on books that have already been canonized by the literary-critical establishment, rather than others that might better fit the idea of the op-ed novel. Yet focusing on novels that might more obviously fit the bill—whether because they more explicitly comment on current affairs, thematize newspaper opinion journalism, or follow a quick publication process—would unnecessarily limit the scope of this study. My purpose is precisely the opposite—that is, to show how deeply the op-ed novel paradigm is embedded in contemporary Spanish and arguably world literature. To focus on magnum opuses and other bestselling and prize-winning novels is to go to the heart of questions of literary and social impact. And to be able to show the presence of opinion journalism in the most canonical works of post-Franco Spanish literature is to reveal the op-ed novel as a central, if overlooked, paradigm of contemporary literature.

Chapter 1

A Literary History of Opinion Journalism

Juan Luis Cebrián was nothing if not ambitious. Serving as the editor in chief of El País from its founding in 1976 until 1988—when he became CEO of the newspaper’s parent company, Prisa—Cebrián set a high bar for the paper. He wanted El País to become nothing less than Spain’s de facto public sphere. “From my point of view,” Cebrián wrote in his 1980 book The Press and Main Street, “the absence of a real public opinion in our country weakens the claim of representation made by our democratic administrations.”1 At El País, the editorial pages in particular would be tasked with generating “real public opinion.” And in the New York Times and Le Monde editorial pages, Cebrián found a recent innovation that might help him. We have come to think of it as the modern op-ed page. Cebrián called Spain’s first modern op-ed page the “tribuna libre” (open platform). “The platform of El País,” he wrote in the paper’s inaugural opinion column on May 4, 1976, “will be open to all the people and ideologies that want to express themselves in its pages, with the only condition being that arguments, questionable as they may be, will be respectful of their adversary and support solutions for coexistence [convivencia] among Spaniards.”2 If Cebrián borrowed the new page’s name from Le Monde’s long-standing “tribune libre,” he borrowed its ideals from the New York Times. Couched in civil discourse, Cebrián’s open call for opinions mirrored what the founder of the Times op-ed page, John B. Oakes, had written several years earlier, in his own inaugural announcement. “The health of [American] democracy has 32



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increasingly depended on deeper public understanding of difficult issues,” Oakes wrote. To foster that understanding, op-ed contributors would be “writing on the widest possible range of subject matter and expressing the widest possible variety of opinion.” The goal, he concluded, was “to create an intellectual forum from which, to paraphrase Terence, nothing will be foreign that relates to man and his society.”3 As with all such ambitious projects, however, there was a catch. For El País, the catch was that the newspaper quickly came to define its target audience rather narrowly. One might think a paper aiming to become the public sphere of a new democratic society would look to expand the country’s newspaper-reading public. But the young publication, one of two major newspapers launched in 1976, was most interested in the public that already existed.4 “It is not easy to understand,” Cebrián explained in his book, “how newspapers with low circulation and even lower readership—estimated at 20 to 25 percent of all voters— can be so powerful. This makes more sense once one accepts the notion that elites and opinion leaders influence voter decisions or politicians’ judgments almost solely on the basis of newspaper articles.”5 Given the conditions on the ground, Cebrián wrote in the paper’s inaugural op-ed, it would be impossible to reach “all the people” of Spain or to represent the country’s plethora of ideological persuasions. So why even try? Rather than proselytize newspaper reading to a wide audience, as one might have reasonably assumed, the purpose of the new editorial page was instead to target the small and influential elite fraction of voters who already read papers regularly. And this, over the course of its fivedecade-long history, is precisely what the El País op-ed page would do. This chapter tells two interconnected histories of the El País op-ed page. The first recounts how the paper’s op-ed page came into being during the early years of a newly democratic Spanish society. The second excavates the global history of the op-ed page, focusing on the influence of the international newspapers that loomed largest at El País’s founding in 1976. In spite of their differences in orientation, both of these histories are told through the prism of literary intellectuals and their changing relationship to newspaper opinion writing since the

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1970s. Indeed, as we will see, literary writers appeared on the El País opinion page from its very first issue and have remained there ever since, helping maintain the newspaper’s preeminent status in Spain. In this chapter and throughout the book, I take a big-tent approach to examining what the op-ed page is and how it works. Though I sometimes distinguish between certain forms of opinion writing (e.g., a regular column versus a one-off op-ed), these differences do not especially matter to the particular history I tell. That’s because this history is one of career arcs, oeuvres, and repeated attempts to contribute to national and international debates, not, in other words, a study of the op-ed form itself. Myriad types of articles fall within the genre of opinion writing. So, I treat them as such, highlighting these differences in form only when they are relevant to understanding the particular context in which they appear.6 As this chapter will show, it is no coincidence that so many literary writers who have aspired to a role in Spanish public life have contributed to the El País opinion section. It has been the country’s dominant and most widely read opinion section for nearly half a century. By the same token, it is also no coincidence that the El País opinion section has been perhaps the most scrutinized opinion section in the Spanish press, regularly receiving significant criticism for the op-eds it has published, the editors it has hired, and the editorial decisions it has made.7 The literary history of opinion journalism that follows will show how the El País opinion section became a home for literary writers in the postFranco years, at around the same time that novelist intellectuals, in their professional literary lives, were developing new literary forms of public engagement as well as recovering old ones.

The Collective Intellectual Convivencia, or coexistence, the term Cebrián used in his inaugural El País column, was a loaded term in Spain. In the postwar period, the term was popularized by the renowned philologist Américo Castro, who marshaled it in his book España en su historia (The Structure of Spanish



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History, 1948) to argue that Spanish people were not a pure biological race but rather the product of centuries of coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the medieval Iberian Peninsula.8 During the country’s transition to democracy, convivencia resurfaced in popular usage as a way to delegitimize the single-party, single-ideology system Francoism had imposed on Spain over the previous four decades.9 Context was important: many at the time, especially on the left, feared another right-wing coup—fears that would be realized in 1981 with Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero’s coup attempt—and talking about convivencia was one way to stave off the threat, if only rhetorically.10 A miniature public sphere based on convivencia, Cebrián thought, might broaden the spectrum of legitimate political opinion. But it was also a shrewd business move. As the New York Times discovered shortly after the launch of its op-ed page in 1970, the continuous stoking of controversy was a good way to keep drawing readers back to newsstands.11 In addition to tapering fears on the left, the rhetoric of convivencia was also a way to appeal to existing Francoist elites. Its tone of moderation attracted those wary of a complete rupture with the past, culturally, legally, and, above all, economically. The messenger helped: Cebrián was, for these elites, the ideal figure to helm this move into the unknown. Young, hard-working, and from a well-known bourgeois family, Cebrián had quickly risen through the ranks of the journalistic profession under late Francoism to become a senior editor of the third most important newspaper in the country by the age of nineteen.12 His father was an ideologically committed Falangist who had edited the newspaper Arriba—an organ of Franco’s party—and had served as secretary general of the Francoist press.13 Because of these familial ties to statesanctioned media, Cebrián, in the words of the journalist Gregorio Morán, had “the perfect pedigree for those in the regime who aspired to pilot a transition [to democracy].”14 The same was true of Cebrián’s close associate Jesús de Polanco, the cofounder and first CEO of Prisa, the parent company of El País. Polanco, who also hailed from a right-wing family, was “used to being

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called Spain’s Rupert Murdoch.”15 In 1960, he founded the educational and textbook company Santillana, which sold books across the Spanishspeaking world.16 Santillana’s most lucrative agreement came in 1970, when the company became one of the Spain’s most profitable publishers almost overnight. That year, Polanco had received inside information about imminent liberalizing reforms to the Spanish education sector, “making it possible for Santillana to have the textbooks ready for distribution before anyone else.”17 As a result of its preparation, the company was given valuable government contracts and, thanks to its already established footprint in Latin America, quickly became one of the largest Spanish-language publishers in the world.18 Following his success at Santillana, Polanco cofounded Prisa in 1972. The country was still in the midst of the dictatorship, and the success of the new newspaper project depended on being able to bring in certain modernizing figures from the Franco regime. Early in the life of the parent company, several well-known right-wing political figures became Prisa’s first shareholders, some even joining the board of directors.19 Manuel Fraga, the former minister of information under Franco, served as an adviser. Other right-wing figures, such as Pedro Laín Entralgo, José María de Areilza, and Manuel Milián Mestre, mobilized their economic and political connections during the last years of the Franco regime to buoy the company’s finances. Prisa relied on these men for economic, political, and practical reasons: partly to avoid the arbitrariness of the regime’s new censorship laws, partly to keep the company on stable financial footing, and partly to attract a right-ofcenter readership.20 As one historian put it, “No one planned on making a left-wing newspaper, not even a center-left newspaper, because, among other reasons, the so-called liberal left did not exist . . . under Francoism.”21 The new newspaper, El País, published its first issue on May 4, 1976, just months after Franco’s death. In those early years, a cacophony of elite voices—mostly but not entirely conservative—vied for spots in the paper’s opinion pages. Three broad groups competed to be heard, the largest of which was the pro-reform yet conservative bourgeoisie,



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headlined by such figures as the architect Fernando Chueca Goitia and the politician Antonio de Senillosa.22 The next largest group included figures from the Francoist economic, cultural, and political establishment, such as the journalist Emilio Romero, the philologist Antonio Tovar, and the diplomat José María Alfaro. The smallest group in this power struggle consisted of left-of-center intellectual elites, including the philosophers Julián Marías and José Luis López-Aranguren.23 Unexpectedly, it was toward this last group’s political ideology that the paper would steadily drift over the course of its first decade. The strength of the left-of-center group’s influence led Aranguren, in 1981, to call the paper a “collective intellectual.”24 The moniker stuck. As one scholar put it, the opinion section of the paper “had the wherewithal to turn itself into the interpreter of the aspirations of the most dynamic sector of the ruling class.”25 Since the mid-1960s, that ruling class had come to champion a social wave of anti-Francoism. Yet even as academics and writers like Aranguren and Marías provided the paper with ideological diversity, all of them hailed from the same economic and social class. In the memorable phrase of one observer, the outsized influence of these intellectuals on the paper amounted to “el rapto del país por El País” (the kidnapping of the country by El País).26 The first issue of El País saw two op-eds appear alongside Cebrián’s inaugural column. The first was an homage to the Spanish poet León Felipe written by another Spanish poet, Rafael Alberti.27 Part of a generation of Spanish artists that included Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel, both Felipe and Alberti supported the antifascist resistance and would go into exile following the Spanish Civil War. Of the two, only Alberti would have the chance to return to Spain, which he did in 1977 from his postwar exile in Argentina and Italy. Felipe, who lived out his exile in Mexico, had died in 1968. Alberti’s column described the history of twentieth-century Spain through three personal encounters with Felipe: the first occurred in the democratic interwar period of the Second Republic, the second during the Spanish Civil War, and the last in exile in Buenos Aires. The column was as personal as it was pedagogical, an attempt to remind Spaniards of their literary

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heritage and to educate those who did not have an opportunity to witness the democratic transformation taking place in Spain. The other op-ed published in El País’s first issue could not have been more different. Focused entirely on current affairs, the historian and Francoist insider Ricardo de la Cierva called for the fascist administration to continue its moderate transition to democracy rather than give in to its authoritarian inclinations.28 “Uncertainty” about democracy, he argued, worryingly persisted in the current administration of then– Prime Minister Carlos Arias Navarro. For the readers on the left, it remained unclear what else de la Cierva could have expected from a man who was given the nickname “the butcher of Málaga” for his conduct during the Spanish Civil War.29 However, the column makes more sense when read from the right, as a warning bell to fellow moderate conservatives who were not sufficiently alarmed by the Falangist party’s unwillingness to carry out democratic reforms. De la Cierva’s piece, like Alberti’s, was directed at a particular audience. While Alberti’s contribution was aimed at the left-of-center world of exiled literary writers and artists, de la Cierva’s focused its attention on moderates in and around the corridors of political power. Each group amounted to a specific subsection of elite readers of El País. Yet neither of these audiences had much to do with each other. Alberti’s audience primarily consisted of educated, left-wing readers who had only recently come of age socially and politically, and who might not have known about the countless writers who went into exile.30 De la Cierva’s audience, by contrast, included Franco-era political and economic elites, whose ambitions or bottom lines might be threatened by recent develo­ pments in the administration. Published in the same newspaper, on the same page, on the same day, these columns evinced the underlying logic of the El País opinion section: freedom of speech meant playing to one’s base. Cross-ideological dialogue was a remote fantasy. Cebrián’s thin conception of press freedom, when applied to the opinion section, amounted to little more than diverse opinions speaking past one another. Convivencia, in other words, meant tolerance and equality, not harmony and understanding.



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As media historian Michael Socolow argues, to function as “a unitary, inclusive, and diverse public sphere,” an opinion page necessarily “obscures the more contentious reality of negotiation amongst multiple publics in any given society.”31 El País, for better or worse, wore the negotiation of this contentious reality on its sleeve. The seeming ideological diversity of op-ed contributors, however, covered up other issues. In 1986, communications scholars Gérard Imbert and José Vidal Beneyto published one of the first comprehensive sociological studies of El País. Some of their findings were revelatory. In a sample of opinion columns published between September and October 1980, Imbert and Vidal Beneyto found that El País had published thirty-two different authors, most of whom were over fifty-five years old and belonged to the political right. This profile was, in many respects, the demographic opposite of the paper’s readership, which primarily was under forty-five and identified with the political left. “This analysis,” writes Vidal Beneyto, who at the time was also a columnist for the paper, “reflects rather well the impact of certain ideological forces on the editorial line of the paper.” He continued, “The opinion section, as outlined in this study, is either very revealing of the true public and ideological nature of the paper or plays a role that has nothing to do with the paper’s journalistic purpose.”32 From its first issue, literary figures were central to the opinion pages of El País. Imbert and Vidal Beneyto made much of this phenomenon in their study. Of the thirty-two contributors to the opinion pages over those two months, seven counted as “literary writers”: Juan Benet, José Antonio Gabriel y Galán, Juan Goytisolo, Octavio Paz, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, José Angel Valente, and Gabriel García Márquez. The majority of these writers were major figures in Spanish-language fiction, and their inclusion in the opinion pages immediately gave the paper unparalleled literary and cultural prestige. But women were nowhere to be found. All thirty-two contributors over the two-month span were men. This complete exclusion of women from the opinion pages was typical of the newspaper in its early years. So much so, in fact, that the only woman to write a regular column for El

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País during its first decade of existence was Rosa Montero. Her column, which launched in 1978, appeared not in the daily opinion section but in the Sunday magazine, El País Semanal. From 1980 to 1981, Montero would be the magazine’s editor in chief. From the late 1970s onward, she followed a similar path as legendary Catalan journalist Montserrat Roig and began writing literature on the side.33 She has since become a paradigmatic figure in the history of the paper. Following the publication of her first novel, Crónica del desamor (Chronicle of heartbreak), in 1979, she emerged as one of the first in what is now a long tradition of El País journalists who have become celebrated literary writers. “El País,” wrote one contemporaneous observer of this phenomenon in 1989, “is the underlying reason for the unprecedented popularity reached by a group of writers that, through its pages, has reached a great number of unconditional readers.” That tradition has included journalists-cum-novelists Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Francisco Umbral, perhaps the most famous practitioners of the dual career. “One might even assert,” the observer continued, “that the impact these writers have had on the public has been such that some have decisively influenced the sensibility of [Spanish] readers.”34 So strong was the tradition that even editor in chief Cebrián himself became a best-selling, if undistinguished, novelist upon the publication of La rusa (The Russian woman) in 1986.35

1.1  El País editor in chief Juan Luis Cebrián with Gabriel García Márquez in 1978. Photo by Marisa Flórez. © El País



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Second only to Montero, Maruja Torres was another towering figure in the group of journalists-cum-novelists at El País. She was recruited by Montero to the paper in 1981, first working as an editor and then, following a brief stint away from the paper, as a regular opinion columnist. Though Torres became a respected war reporter during her time at El País, it was her use of humor and satire in the service of incisive political critique that earned her opinion columns national acclaim. Torres’s sharp commentary would make its way into novels such as ¡Oh es él! Viaje fantástico hacia Julio Iglesias (Desperately Seeking Julio, 1986) and Ceguera de amor (Love drunk, 1991). Montero, too, was known for her own brand of political irony, which appeared in her novels La función delta (The Delta Function, 1981) and Te trataré como a una reina (I’ll treat you like a queen, 1983).36 Their embrace of irony as political critique would reshape both column writing and the literary work of fellow journalist-novelists in Spain.37 Though Montero and Torres were the only women in the opinion section at the time, they were not the only women to work at El País during those early years. Among the paper’s more prominent employees were Soledad Gallego-Díaz, who in 2018 would become the paper’s first female editor in chief; the award-winning reporter Soledad Alameda; Sol ÁlvarezCoto, who was first deputy editor and then editor of the paper’s national section; editor Karmentxu Marín; and photojournalist Marisa Flórez. Yet while these bylines made the paper, they rarely made its opinion section. Apart from Montero and Torres, during the 1980s, only a few female bylines appeared in the opinion section with any regularity, including that of the exiled Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi, herself one of the most important Latin American novelist intellectuals of the past half-century.38 The failure to feature even a single female op-ed contributor in the daily opinion section fell squarely on the shoulders of Javier Pradera, the paper’s opinion editor from 1976 to 1986. Like Cebrián, Pradera had grown up in a staunchly right-wing family; unlike Cebrián, his political break with his family became clear from a young age. In 1955, Pradera joined the clandestine Spanish Communist Party. After nearly a decade,

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he left the party following the expulsion of screenwriter and author Jorge Semprún. When he joined the editorial staff of El País in 1976, Pradera regularly wrote editorials that themselves made headlines. Though the editorials were not signed, Pradera did not hide his politics, and many readers were able to infer his authorship. From the perspective of the Francoist journalist Emilio Romero, “the political and literary resonance of the newspaper” was in the hands of “two senseless communists.”39 Pradera was one of these. His editorials especially drew the ire of readers who, like Romero, were suspicious of his former ties to the Spanish Communist Party. However, unlike Romero, whose accusation was no more than red baiting, many readers shared legitimate concerns about Pradera. “There exist no guarantees of impartiality in the editorial line,” angry readers declared in letters to the editor, showing how important editorial balance was to a reading public that had been fed one unreliable editorial line after another for the previous four decades.40 Readers specifically worried that Pradera was too much of a public figure to be an editorial writer, hiding in plain sight behind the anonymity of a collectively signed editorial. Although the relationship between objectivity and opinion-page writing was still in flux, Pradera saw how the thorniness of the situation might undermine trust in the paper. On February 26, 1986, he stepped down as a staff writer, despite protests from Cebrián and many of his colleagues. When Pradera returned to the paper the following year, all his editorials became opinion columns under his own byline. The other “senseless communist” and public left-wing figure of El País was Francisco Umbral. Early in its life, El País became strongly associated with Umbral’s opinion columns. From 1979 to 1988, Umbral published a regular column for the paper—not bimonthly, not weekly, but daily. As one of the paper’s board members worriedly put it, “The average reader . . . automatically associates El País with Umbral’s column and Peridis’s drawings and that is not good.”41 Yet, given he was very prolific and, according to some, “the greatest columnist of the second half of the twentieth century,” it would have been difficult for any paper to escape the association.42 As a literary intellectual with six



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1.2  Opinion editor Javier Pradera during an election-night colloquium at the offices of El País on June 15, 1977. Uncredited photo. © El País

novels already to his name, Umbral’s position at El País was important because it cemented the paper’s early commitment to featuring literary intellectuals as opinion columnists. This commitment occurred alongside its consolidation atop the Spanish journalistic landscape. During the first six years of its publication, El País’s circulation grew steadily from just under 100,000 copies per day to an impressive average of nearly 300,000 copies per day.43 By comparison, the average circulation for the New York Times at the end of the same period was 929,000—just over three times as many in a country whose population was more than six times larger than Spain’s.44 Although newspaper reading was still not widespread in Spain—by 1988, only 7.8 percent of the population read papers regularly—El País dominated the newspaper market.45 The El País op-ed page would not see its first serious competitor until the late 1980s. On October 23, 1989, Pedro J. Ramírez, the former editor in chief of onetime rival Diario 16—the other major newspaper that was launched in 1976—started a new newspaper called El Mundo. With significant financial backing from the owners of Corriere della Sera, the new Spanish newspaper gained prominence in the early 1990s for its coverage of political corruption and uncovering the existence of

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covert death squads in the Felipe González administration.46 It quickly attracted writers mostly from the political right but also from other political persuasions who did not fit the establishment mold of El País. This included Umbral, undoubtedly the new rival’s flashiest early acquisition.47 In 1988, Umbral left El País for the Ramírez-edited Diario 16, and the next year he followed his editor to the new venture, helping inaugurate the paper’s opinion section. Umbral would not disappoint. His first column, titled “Comer, Joder y Caminar” (Eating, fucking, and walking), borrowed the initials of the novelist Camilo José Cela, who had days earlier been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, celebrating his award-winning friend with esoteric literary references, elbowpoking jokes, and explicit language.48 From then until his death in 2007, Umbral’s column continued to bring in readers by giving an insider view with outsider flavor.

International Precedents By the time Juan Luis Cebrián announced the “tribuna libre” in the first issue of El País, the op-ed genre was only just becoming a recognizable feature of newspapers. For centuries, newspapers in Spain and across the world had published columnists, outside writers, and other kinds of recurring commentary on current affairs. Yet to many outside the editorial offices, there appeared little rhyme or reason to the who, what, when, where, or why of the opinion pieces that might appear on any given day. The creation of the op-ed page at the New York Times in 1970 had, in many respects, been an attempt to address this criticism. Over the course of the next half-century, the consciously designed op-ed page would come to formalize the genre of newspaper opinion writing. The modern history of the op-ed begins with reader complaints. In 1913, the New York World, under the editorship of Joseph Pulitzer, established what it called a Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, a “systematic effort by a newspaper to make itself more accountable” to its readers “through the publication of corrections and internal accountability.”49 Just a few years later, in 1922, the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s most



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important newspapers, established a committee to receive and investigate reader complaints in an internal accountability scheme “modeled after the World’s Bureau.”50 Over the following decade, Asahi’s competitor, the Yomiuri Shimbun, inaugurated what it called the Committee of Newspaper Contents Inspectors in order to evaluate the paper’s quality. The committee, which was originally conceived in response to several lawsuits, had by 1951 turned into what some have described as a “collective ombudsman,” inviting reader comments and criticism.51 During the late 1950s, in response to what was largely recognized as a “moment of crisis of confidence in the media,” the New York Times turned its attention to its editorial pages.52 At the time, the newspaper ran editorials on one page and letters to the editor on the other. One account suggests that, in 1958, editor John B. Oakes had received letters that were too long to be published as letters but not long enough to be published as articles in the Times magazine. Oakes thought these pieces were viable, yet the constraints of the paper dictated otherwise. In 1961, once Oakes was appointed editorial page editor, he began occasionally commissioning outside opinion pieces that would directly challenge the arguments advanced in editorials. He published these opinion pieces opposite the editorials, right above the letters to the editor. When Arthur Sulzberger was appointed the paper’s publisher in 1963, Oakes presented the idea to formalize these long letters to the editor that might every so often challenge the newspaper’s own views. The new section would combine Oakes’s desire to continue commissioning non-staff opinion pieces with his appetite for publishing lengthy letters submitted by outside readers.53 It would take another seven years for the new section to come into existence. He would call it the “Op. Ed. Page”— short for “opposite the editorial page.” On September 21, 1970, the idea for what Oakes called “an independent forum for the rational exchange of views” materialized.54 “The purpose of the Op. Ed. page is neither to reinforce nor to counterbalance the Times’s own editorial position,” wrote the editors in a short announcement. “The objective is rather to afford greater opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new ideas by writers

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and thinkers who have no institutional connection with The Times and whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.”55 Oakes envisioned his new section as capturing “the whole broad range of opinion, the conflict of ideas,” that was taking place in society at any given moment in time.56 The ideal of using the opinion pages of the newspaper as a miniature public sphere quickly caught on. In its first years, the Times op-ed page became the most-read section of the newspaper. In fact, it kept the newspaper economically afloat during the financial turmoil of the 1970s. Readers, after all, sought out controversy, and the opinion section regularly manufactured it. As Socolow, the media historian, writes, the op-ed page “effectively wedded the philosophical notion of a public sphere and the practical reality of a newspaper needing to be profitable.”57 Inviting outsiders with no institutional connections to contribute opinion articles has partly come to define the modern op-ed form. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, many newspapers across the world would come to embrace the form. However, though Times editors hoped the balance of the page might help counter the perception in Washington that the paper was anticonservative, the final product, journalism historian Matthew Pressman writes, “did little to change the overall ideological tilt of the opinion pages.”58 Although the Times’s op-ed model has become a global standard, the basic idea behind it originated well before the 1970 announcement. In 1921, the recently hired editorial page editor of the New York World, Herbert Bayard Swope, introduced the concept of publishing opinion pieces by outside writers opposite the editorial page. Literary writers such as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and G. K. Chesterton were recruited to contribute nonfiction opinion articles on all matter of politics and current affairs for a new part of the paper called the “page Op.” “It occurred to me,” Swope wrote in a letter to a friend, “that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America . . . and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.”59 In attempting to compete with other newspapers



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over sales and public attention, opinion—especially opinion written by nonjournalists—became an untapped resource that allowed the paper to expand the topics it covered without having to grow its staff or its bottom line. This was the conclusion reached by papers across the United States, from the launch in 1912 of the Chicago Tribune’s socalled highbrow page in its Sunday edition to the Washington Post’s own “op-ed page” in the 1930s and the Los Angeles Times’s columnists’ page at the start of the 1960s.60 By the end of the 1970s, just as op-ed pages were proliferating in newspapers across the world, scholars in Europe began reflecting on the role of opinion journalism in postwar societies. In the United Kingdom, the Birmingham school collective undertook research into the social production of news. Taking as their subject the racialized moral panic in Britain surrounding street crime, the scholarly collective theorized the relationship between the opinion and news sections of British newspapers. That relationship, the group claimed, was symbiotic. “Formal balance is not the whole story,” the collective, which included Stuart Hall, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, wrote in its 1978 book Policing the Crisis. The interpretation of news reports, they found, “can be effected [sic] by the statement of an editorial judgement on it—usually by taking it over into the opinion part of the paper.”61 Yet so, too, might opinion be warped under the objectivity of news. Some op-ed columnists, they noted, were able to air certain opinions “because they had been incorporated within the newspaper as a form of institutionalized dissent.”62 Stuart Hall and his Birmingham colleagues therefore viewed the newspaper as an institutional whole, not as sections operating independently from one another. Shifts in news section coverage of a story affected the kinds of op-eds published in the opinion section and vice versa. Newspaper readers, they argued, also read newspapers holistically. From the Birmingham school perspective, that the newspaper was treated by readers as a whole rather than by parts, meant that “the debate between ‘experts’ and ‘lay’ opinion served to sharpen rather than alter the shape of arguments . . . which had for some time occupied space in letter columns.”63 Ultimately,

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the Birmingham collective believed, giving more space to opinion journalism could prove salutary. The liberal idea of the public sphere, where ideas could be sharpened through debate, seemed to have been baked into the op-ed form from the very beginning. Cebrián fully embraced this version of American liberalism translated through its newspapers. He subscribed to the idea, as articulated by one longtime Times journalist, that “in the voice of the columnists, one [could] hear, if at times discordantly, the joyful noise of a free people.”64 “Diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of democracy,” Oakes had said years before, upon launching the Times op-ed page. “The minute we begin to insist that everyone think the same way we think, our democratic way of life is in danger.”65 Liberal ideals such as these played an important role among El País’s first generation of editors and writers. Juan Cruz, a first-generation El País journalist, later recalled how the newspaper was “obsessed with publishing articles from all of the possible sectors, in order to start a controversy or to reach across the aisle.” The paper, he continued, commissioned opinion pieces from what it considered to be “the most diverse characters of public life or Spanish or foreign culture.”66 As such, it developed an image, according to another early observer, as “a public space, in which social exchange is articulated and collective identity is projected, a true forum (a symbolic projection of the social community), illustrated by the opinion pages of El País.”67 Given the history laid out so far, the extent to which these ideals were put into practice is questionable. What is undeniable, however, is the fact that their circulation among the El País staff in these early years left a lasting impact on the institutional memory of the paper itself. Even as it borrowed liberally from American newspapers, the early op-ed page of El País contrasted rather dramatically with its American counterpart. “Unlike the op-ed pages of The New York Times or Washington Post, where politicians often go to make their programs sound palatable, the opinion pages of the young El País,” the journalist Jonathan Blitzer has argued, “were more akin to an evolving think tank whose participants were in large part the decision-makers.”68 According



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to Blitzer, a 1995 poll of Spanish public opinion showed that “82 percent of Spaniards felt that the press had played the largest role in democratization, more significant than that of any political figure except Adolfo Suárez, the first democratically elected prime minister to succeed the late dictator.”69 It has even been suggested that political leaders at the time took their political programs directly from the El País op-ed page.70 If true, this wouldn’t come as much of a surprise. During the early years of El País, as Cebrián described in a memoir years later, he, Pradera, and other figures at the paper partook in the ongoing backdoor conversations among the country’s politicians, corporate elites, and monarchy.71 Despite the influence of American newspapers on Cebrián, his starting point for El País was French. Le Monde shaped Cebrián’s own desire for the paper to be “at once critical and institutional.”72 As Cebrián wrote in his memoirs, “Le Monde was considered the professional bible at the time.”73 Among all the options presented to potential El País shareholders before the paper launched, “it was the dream of being Le Monde that they aspired to.”74 That Le Monde was El País’s primary point of reference is also not altogether surprising. Le Monde was perhaps the most widely circulated foreign newspaper in Spain during the 1960s, when copies were licitly and illicitly sought at the French embassy in Madrid and at lycées across the country. The paper’s wide circulation in Spain had to do not only with the two countries sharing a border but also with the fact that many Spaniards during the Franco era were far more conversant in French than in English.75 To the consternation of Francoist authorities, the paper became well known among the Madrid elite for its articles by José Antonio Novais, its Spanish correspondent—articles the Spanish government would have undoubtedly censored.76 Foreign newspapers, and Le Monde in particular, were, in many ways, some of the only resources Spanish elites had for keeping tabs on their own government.77 What did it mean for Cebrián and others to create a Spanish Le Monde? It meant, above all, walking a fine line between being “both a newspaper of reference and a journal of opinion.”78 Where newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post asked writers and

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editors beyond the opinion pages to conceal their political inclinations, Le Monde made these visible across the entire paper. Not doing so, founding editor Hubert Beuve-Méry believed, was an act of dishonesty. This notion of objectivity is perhaps what most distinguishes journalism in Europe from how it is practiced in the United States. As one study comparing German and American journalism has argued, “for US journalists, it [is] imperative to keep their professional performances as pure from opinion as possible.” Meanwhile, “in Germany, fact and opinion are much more closely related, in the news, the occupational division of labor, in self-conceptions and performances,” which leads many to believe that “to avoid opinion is bad journalism” and that journalists must make their own position clear to readers.79 The same holds true for Le Monde and also for El País, as the Spanish paper has shown time and again. As a study of political opinion in the Spanish press found, “Although newspapers have a section specifically for opinion, four of the five [major national] newspapers”—El País, ABC, La Razón, and La Vanguardia—“publish more opinion articles outside that section than inside it. The case of El País, in particular, stands out, where only 23% of opinion articles on political issues appear integrated in the opinion section.”80 The rest of the opinion articles on politics, according to the study, were spread throughout the paper’s other, non-opinion sections, such as the news section. Whether at El País or Le Monde, having opinions as a journalist, however, did not necessarily mean submitting to a paper’s ideological leanings. On July 4, 1952, Le Monde began publishing what it called “libres opinions” (free opinions), an editorial feature that would evolve over time into the paper’s dedicated op-ed section.81 Created in response to a crisis in the Gaullist movement, the section ran under various headers: “libres opinions,” “tribune libre,” and “débats.” In the early days of “libres opinions,” Le Monde published fewer than one per week; in recent years, that number has reached several dozen.82 While other dailies in France at the time, such as the conservative Le Figaro, used the opinion and other sections of the newspaper to take clear ideological stances, Le Monde avoided defining its politics, even in its opinion



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section. A 1980 survey of the paper’s readers found “an almost equal division of opinions as to its political orientation, with many saying that it had no definite orientation, although 51 percent defined it as centerleft.”83 These mixed accounts of Le Monde’s political opinions hewed closely to the paper’s own self-image, cultivating a particular kind of readership through political unpredictability.84 Le Monde, like El País, was required reading for France’s political elite.85 The paper featured a rotating stable of politicians and intellectuals, who appeared not only in the opinion pages but also across the different sections of the paper. The French elite returned the favor: almost since its founding, Le Monde has played an influential and enduring role in French politics.86 Though neither has been able to recover the political influence of decades past, the opinion pages of Le Monde and El País nonetheless still operate today as a pipeline for disseminating elite opinion.

A Second Opinion Juan Luis Cebrián was not the first choice to become editor in chief of El País. In the early 1970s, the name that quickly rose to the top of the list was that of the novelist and newspaper editor Miguel Delibes.87 Delibes, who was the editor in chief of El Norte de Castilla, one of Spain’s oldest dailies, was a towering figure in postwar Spanish journalism and literature. A precursor to Antonio Muñoz Molina, Javier Marías, Almudena Grandes, and other novelist intellectuals who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, Delibes belonged to an earlier generation of writer-journalists that had followed in the footsteps of Eugeni d’Ors and José Ortega y Gasset. Delibes and his middle generation, which included such figures as Josep Pla, Julio Camba, and César GonzálezRuano, gained prominence during the postwar years.88 With this middle generation, the opinion column in Spain returned—involuntarily—to its nineteenth-century literary origins. In the 1950s and 1960s, metaphor, literary description, and interior monologue were as much the stuff of novels as of opinion columns. Even travel writing came to be a

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regular staple in the opinion pages.89 Delibes, for his part, considered opinion journalism a genre of storytelling. “The novelist operates with people and things,” he once explained in an interview, “the essayist operates with ideas.”90 By early 1975, Delibes had been approached for the top job at El País. “Ortega Spottorno has come to offer me the editorship of El País, the new liberal daily that will appear—if they let him—in Madrid,” he wrote to his close friend, the Catalan editor Josep Vergès, on February 3. “For me, this has no other attraction than the possibility of changing my way of life. But, in Madrid? I would have already said no, but I prefer that you all, my longtime friends, give me your opinion beforehand.”91 Vergès’s response arrived a week later. It was positive—a clean break with his past, Vergès said, would be very helpful given that Ángeles de Castro, Delibes’s wife, had died months earlier. But it came with an important caveat: “The situation is too unclear right now to even try the most minimal of liberal politics, which is what Ortega pretends to do.” Having also been an editor under the dictatorship’s censorship regime, Vergès was not convinced the situation would change significantly, even as Franco himself was ill and nearing death. In all, Delibes would consider the offer for roughly a year. Yet despite the recommendations of Vergès and others, he ultimately chose to remain the editor of El Norte de Castilla, a position he had held since 1958. Delibes’s pass on the job was one of the most consequential editorial decisions in twentieth-century Spanish journalism. It has led to the endlessly debated counterfactual among journalists and historians: How might El País have been different under Delibes’s editorship?92 In the case of the opinion pages, Delibes’s belief that the op-ed was a distinct form of writing would have clashed with Cebrián’s idea for a lucrative spectacle of ideological bouts. For Delibes, op-eds had their own rhetorical, literary, and argumentative style that could be reduced neither to the “temptation to apply literature to journalism” nor to the idea that each opinion was meant to represent a slice of the political spectrum.93 Opinions were not a sport. Making them in the service of anything besides the soundness of reason was, for him, tantamount to



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dogmatism—the very Francoist vice Spain’s democratic press was presumably trying to overcome. “This,” Delibes wrote, “is the great contemporary problem: needing to think, needing to reflect before making a decision. . . . To let oneself get carried away is becoming a generalized attitude in the world.”94 This was most true of columnists, he explained. Columnists were very prone to allowing themselves to be swept up in the latest political, intellectual, or literary fad. The idea that any of them would be leading the creation of a public sphere in Spain would have been at best misguided and at worst catastrophic. Echoing Larra, the appropriate disposition toward journalism, Delibes thought, was to see it as “the human evaluation of quotidian events.”95 Nothing more, nothing less.

Chapter 2

Anxieties of the Novelist Intellectual

Antonio Muñoz Molina was not a fan of Pulp Fiction. “The secret to its comedy,” he wrote of the film upon its Spanish release in his weekly column for El País, “consists in the repetition of a single mechanism: that of indifference to the pain of others.”1 That the film’s characters and its theater-going audience seemed to uncritically accept this indifference, he argued, taught us something about the moment in which we were living. Films like Pulp Fiction, he wrote, dressed up base desires in refined aesthetic packaging, duping audiences into thinking humanity’s most dangerous flaws, such as the propensity toward violence, should be embraced rather than suppressed. This was not the first time Muñoz Molina had come across a celebrated cultural artifact he thought had gone morally awry. Something similar had happed a couple of years earlier, in 1993, following the release of Pedro Almodóvar’s black comedy Kika. The film features a lengthy scene in which the titular protagonist is raped at knifepoint. While many around him were “dying of laughter,” Muñoz Molina, watching the film’s premiere in Madrid, felt as though he was at a cocktail party, and someone had “made a joke about Black people.” Just as in Pulp Fiction, the problem with Kika, according to Muñoz Molina, had to do with the film’s disregard for the line that separates comedy from callousness. “The best comedian,” he concluded, “is the one that knows that there are certain things no one has the right to laugh at.”2 Not everyone agreed with Muñoz Molina’s stark views about the ethics of art.3 One of those dissenters was Javier Marías, Muñoz 54



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Molina’s future colleague on the El País op-ed page. In one of the more memorable exchanges of the 1990s, Marías and Muñoz Molina traded op-eds over the meaning of violence in Pulp Fiction. Marías took Muñoz Molina to task specifically for his rather literal reading of the film, calling that reading “a little elemental” and not far from that of Spain’s most conservative, censorship-promoting viewers.4 Muñoz Molina fired back, seeing in Marías a “Freudian malevolence” that made him a moral relativist, incapable of answering the question: “Can there exist an excellent Nazi comedy about the Holocaust?”5 Over the next several decades, Muñoz Molina further hardened his moral approach to aesthetics. He regularly took public stances meant to give his novels a weighty moral character, the most symbolic of which came when he called for Palestinian statehood during his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which he won, in large part, for a novel on persecution, exile, and violence under the noteworthy title Sefarad (meaning “Spain” in Hebrew but also referencing Sephardic Jews). Intellectuals, Muñoz Molina believed, were responsible for educating their readers about not just culture but morality. This responsibility was especially pressing in Spain, given its particular situation of having recently suffered a four-decade-long authoritarian dictatorship. Muñoz Molina first began practicing moral and cultural pedagogy in the early 1980s in the pages of the Diario de Granada, the local Andalusian newspaper for which he wrote his first regular opinion column. As he began publishing fiction, his pedagogical style migrated with him to the pages of his early novels such as El invierno en Lisboa (Winter in Lisbon, 1987) or El jinete polaco (The Polish rider, 1991). Art, he explained in the exchange with Marías over Pulp Fiction, doesn’t have “the responsibility to moralize,” but it “always has moral and ideological dimensions, and . . . reactions to artworks and aesthetic judgments, whether conscious or intuitive, are never exclusively formal.”6 Teaching readers about what ought to count as morally acceptable art, and worrying about whether his own art lived up to those standards, would become one of the guiding preoccupations of Muñoz Molina’s career as a novelist intellectual.

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Alongside educating his readers about morality and art, two other morally inflected obsessions came to dominate Muñoz Molina’s career. One was balance, that is, of promoting an even-handed view of the subject at hand, opting for self-styled moderate opinions over those that were seen as tending too much toward either extreme. In choosing moderation, Muñoz Molina broke with what he saw as the arrogance, dismissiveness, and mudslinging nonchalance of earlier novelist intellectuals, including the Nobel Prize–winning writer Camilo José Cela and the influential columnist Francisco Umbral. The other obsession was that of claiming to speak on behalf of a group of people, most often in defense of that group against outside misinformation, manipulation, and other forms of ideological malfeasance. After reaching the heights of intellectual renown, Muñoz Molina used his platform to defend the Basque people against armed Basque nationalism, Catalans against pro-independence Catalan nation­ alism, and all Spaniards against a false image of Spain supposedly being promoted by journalists, academics, and other intellectuals abroad. These anxieties about morality and art are certainly not particular to Muñoz Molina. They have also afflicted an array of novelist intellectuals in Spain. In this book, we will see them crop up time and again in the group of writers under consideration. But Muñoz Molina may be the best writer through which to consider these concerns because, of the group of novelist intellectuals in this book, and perhaps in Spain more generally, Muñoz Molina has dealt with these anxieties the longest and most extensively in writing. He has done so, since the 1980s, across some three dozen novels, short story collections, diaries, nonfiction books, and essay collections, which have been translated into twenty languages, making his writing some of the most globally circulated of all contemporary literary writers in Spain.7 The unimpeachable regularity of his writing of novels and opinion columns, in particular, offers an unparalleled perspective from which to witness how these intellectual anxieties played out in the most public of ways. When it comes to novelist intellectuals, the



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regularity of opinion writing, I will argue here and throughout the book, shapes the kind of writing they perceive to be aesthetically valuable and determines the literary forms they use. In the case of Muñoz Molina, scholars have missed this connection despite a history of interest in his literary and journalistic writing. This is because they have largely analyzed the two genres separately in his oeuvre.8 I think this separation is a mistake. It leads to a partial view of Muñoz Molina as a novelist intellectual as well as to a limited understanding of how his novels, columns, and other public interventions function together. In recent years, scholars across a variety of fields have begun to study literary intellectuals in a more holistic way.9 Rather than study artworks and public persona separately, these scholars have attempted to bring these facets of literary intellectuals together. However, what has not yet fully been accounted for is how writing an opinion column shapes the public persona and literary works of a writer in ways that are distinct from those who write occasional essays and book reviews. Both columnists and occasional essayists can be literary intellectuals, but the difference between the two is just as much a matter of scale and frequency as it is of kind. Fiction and nonfiction writing require different analytical ap­ proach­es. However, in trying to understand the work of a novelist intellectual we disadvantage ourselves when we completely separate one from the other. Thus, the kind of simultaneous reading practiced throughout this chapter and the rest of this book attends to this difference without completely separating one genre of writing from the other. It involves a form of contextual criticism that reads a novel not simply as representative of its social context but also as attempting to directly intervene in that context, not unlike an op-ed. This chapter, in particular, examines how morally charged concerns over pedagogy, balance, and representation have cropped up across different moments in Muñoz Molina’s career. And his attempts to work through, contest, or even ignore them provide a unique way of bringing both sides of that career together: the novelist and the intellectual.

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Antonio Muñoz Molina began his writing career not as a novelist, but as an opinion journalist. On May 7, 1982, he made his debut as a columnist in the recently founded Diario de Granada.10 In his inaugural column, titled “Primer Manual” (First manual), he pledged that the column would observe the world through the eyes of an “urban Robinson”—that is, “a solitary and disinterested voyeur” who, with his “omnivorous tastes,” “has the pleasure . . . of traversing the city without going anywhere in particular and without any company other than the voice of his conscience.”11 From such a vantage, Muñoz Molina claimed, an opinion writer could make “modern literature, anchored in the moment, whose natural space was the hurried pages of newspapers.”12 For a twenty-six-year-old civil servant in Granada’s municipal culture office, Muñoz Molina was ambitious. His bi-weekly column in the Diario, which became the first of several regular columns he would write for newspapers in Granada during the 1980s, was called “El Robinson urbano” (The urban Robinson), in reference not only to the eighteenth-century novel, Robinson Crusoe, but also to the journalistic prowess of its author, Daniel Defoe.13 His column stood out for its ability to pack dozens of literary references into as many sentences of prose. Among the writers referenced, he singled out Thomas De Quincey and Charles Baudelaire for cataloging images of the modern city’s most frightening yet telling scenes. Whether portraying people starving on Oxford Street or crowds tyrannically encroaching on the fourth arrondissement, these images, Muñoz Molina claimed, revealed an urban underside that many residents did not—or did not want to—see. Of all such literary forebearers, the one who most “gave definitive shape to the labyrinth and profile of the urban Robinson,” however, was James Joyce.14 For Muñoz Molina, Ulysses was a novel that, better than any other, observed the disparate, contradictory, yet animating features of city life. Joyce’s “inner city shipwreck” managed to describe the “sad streets of Dublin” in their entirety, from their “window displays” to their “humble paradises of alcohol.”15 Unlike Virginia Woolf, who appraised society from the comfort of her Bloomsbury apartment, Joyce,



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according to Muñoz Molina, braved the elements to cultivate a perspective that was not limited to that of the bourgeoisie. “The best literature of modernity,” Muñoz Molina made clear in the first line of his inaugural column, “has been written by the great urban Robinsons.”16 Muñoz Molina would go on to write forty-one columns under the “Urban Robinson” banner.”17 He knew confidence in the press’s truthtelling ability was low, yet even after four decades of Francoist authoritarianism, techniques of persuasion in opinion journalism had not completely fallen into disrepute.18 There was space, intellectually and professionally, he reasoned, for a mode of opinion-journalistic writing that deployed fictional strategies without further damaging the incipient but growing democratic legitimacy and authority of the press. One of the early practices Muñoz Molina adopted in his journalism, which he would later employ in his fiction, was the use of discordant literary and cultural references. “It is not unheard of in a 500-word column,” the literary scholar David Herzberger notes, “for Muñoz Molina to invoke ten to twelve names associated with the world of arts and letters. For example, [in one article, he cites] Mallarmé, Cézanne, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Lucrecia Borgia, Las Meninas, Botticelli, Aphrodite, and Professor Moriarty.”19 Muñoz Molina’s Anglophilia would have been perplexing to the Spanish-reading audience of the Diario de Granada, and some of his more contemporary references to English-language writers would have only recently been accessible, following the Franco regime’s partliberalization of its censorship laws.20 Yet, for him, being an informed participant in democracy meant seeking the help of cultural touchstones the world over. Hence why his columns offered Andalusian readers a smorgasbord of cultural referents, many of which had been tucked away during the years of dictatorship. These worldly names and references opened up the metaphorical avenues through which the Andalusian readers of the Diario might confront their tumultuous political reality. By the publication of Muñoz Molina’s first column, Spain had experienced nearly a decade of political and social upheaval. Spain’s decade-long transition to democracy had begun, roughly, in the winter of 1973, when the armed Basque

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separatist group, ETA, blew up the Dodge 3700 of Franco-appointed then–prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco as he returned home from morning mass. The transition would culminate nearly a decade later, with the 1982 general election, which the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party won in a landslide, and the subsequent peaceful transfer of power. During that decade, Spaniards were continually reminded of the fragility of their renewed experiment with democracy. Massacres in the cities of Vitoria and Madrid in 1976 and 1977, respectively, as well as Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero’s failed military coup d’état in 1981, signaled for many how easily fascist rule could be resurrected overnight. Muñoz Molina’s column would debut less than fifteen months after Tejero’s failed coup d’état and just six months before the general election that would give the Socialist Party an absolute majority in the Spanish parliament.

2.1  Journalists read a special edition of El País on the steps of the Palace Hotel in Madrid on the night of the coup attempt on February 23, 1981. Photo by Ricardo Martín. © El País



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The events of 1973 and 1982 bookended the period of Muñoz Molina’s own political awakening. Several months after Carrero Blanco’s 1973 assassination, the New York Times reported, “university students clashed with the police in Madrid and Barcelona after declaring a strike in protest against the execution . . . of Salvador Puig Antich, a 26-yearold Catalonian anarchist.”21 A student at the Complutense University of Madrid’s school of information science, Muñoz Molina was one of those students, and this was his first political protest.22 His views on politics, however, would undergo significant change over the course of the next decade. By the time he began writing about Andalusian politics for the Diario in 1982, his politics had consolidated into the belief that a constitutional monarchy was the form of government best equipped to guarantee freedom of the press and express the will of the Spanish people. Despite his support for freedom of the press, Muñoz Molina had little patience for the so-called marketplace of ideas. Like many on the left, he thought the marketplace of ideas was a thin concept with little substance. The marketplace metaphor poorly represented society, replacing democratic pedagogy with the scaffolding of formal equality. Pedagogy, not lip-service fairness, motivated Muñoz Molina’s early column writing. Preparing Spanish citizens for the new democratic present, in his view, could not be accomplished by staging ideological bouts in the public square. Instead, he insisted, the press had to take a more hands-on approach to inculcating democratic values in its readers. These pedagogical ideas appeared in his first two books, El Robinson urbano and Diario del Nautilus, both of which collected op-eds from his regular columns in the Diario and other Granada newspapers.23 Some of these educational insights notably came from Joyce, whose view of his fellow Irish citizens, in the words of scholar Beth Blum, as “a people characterized by both ‘defiance’ and ‘impotence,’ who shunned authoritarianism but yearned for advice” could have also applied to many Spanish citizens.24 Spanish citizens, Muñoz Molina thought, had emerged from decades of dictatorial repression craving a kind of literary service journalism that could be neatly packaged into the digestible form of the op-ed.25

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Muñoz Molina dealt with his anxiety of wanting to provide a moral and cultural education the only way he knew how: by turning to literature. As he said years later, reflecting on his early writing process, “I compress in the column the same elements I do in a novel. The only difference is space.”26 “For me,” he explained, “a column is a literary genre, within that peculiar form of literature that is journalism. I say ‘literature’ because what is done in a newspaper is to narrate the world with words. A column is, or should be, a very synthetic, closed form, almost like a poem, and also a quick essay, the equivalent of a sketch drawing.”27 Muñoz Molina viewed his column—or retroactively understood its purpose—as a space to workshop prose writing that could be both literary and opinionated. His early columns, Herzberger has argued, managed to “suture his love for literature with an emphasis . . . on social justice, politics, and ethics.”28 In 1980s Spain, the opinion column was more amenable to literature than the novel was to opinion journalism. Put differently, while the gatekeepers to the public sphere had become more ecumenical, those protecting the literary sphere remained beholden to predemocratic tastes—namely, the social realist style that had dominated the country’s literary writing from the 1940s onward. Nowhere was this tension more apparent than in the Royal Spanish Academy, whose members included many novelists, but also journalists and scholars. The academic establishment had simultaneously come to see the opinion column as a form of literary writing, yet continued to view fictional works as more distinguished than opinion writing. At the same time, influential scholars in the academy and elsewhere still believed opinions and ideas were an unnecessary appendage to fiction, “politicizing” novels in ways that devalued their literary quality.29 Muñoz Molina was caught somewhere in between. He would become part of a growing group of novelists who would turn the op-ed pages of newspapers across Spain into literary institutions for writers—the same group that would, in turn, import to the novel the rhetorical lessons of opinion journalism. Muñoz Molina was still moonlighting for the Diario and working a day job for the Granada city council when his first novel appeared on



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bookstands in 1986. Titled Beatus Ille (A Manuscript of Ashes), the novel’s publication by the storied Barcelona publishing house Seix Barral was the result of Muñoz Molina’s fortuitous encounter with the poet and editor Pere Gimferrer, during the latter’s visit to Granada to deliver a lecture in the early 1980s.30 A year after his first novel, Muñoz Molina would publish his second, El invierno en Lisboa, also with Gimferrer at Seix Barral. Though his first novel was well-received, it was his second that would propel him to literary stardom, becoming a bestseller and winning Spain’s National Critics’ Prize and National Literature Prize within a span of several months in 1988. Following the awards, he decided to leave his day job as a civil servant to become a full-time writer.31 El invierno en Lisboa gave Muñoz Molina not only literary but also a form of journalistic legitimacy. It positioned him, like an opinion journalist, as an original observer of the social transformations occurring in 1980s Spain. Whether these observations were told through fiction or nonfiction was in some sense beside the point. The novel tells the story of a Spanish pianist who suddenly becomes drawn into an international search for a stolen Cézanne. Laced with the intellectual catnip of jazz music, the art market, major European cities, and boozy nights, we hear this story secondhand, through an unnamed narrator who tries to piece together his own memories as well as those that have been recounted to him by the pianist himself, Santiago Biralbo. These memories mostly congregate around two moments. One takes place in the early 1980s and revolves around Biralbo’s love affair with a woman named Lucrecia, whom he meets in an after-hours jazz club in San Sebastián. The other occurs a couple years later, when Lucrecia sends Biralbo a call for help by way of a postcard from Lisbon. The call for help sets in motion an action-packed whodunit filled with everything from a chase scene on a train to a holdup in a bathroom. In keeping with its postmodern, analeptic, film noir style, the episodically structured novel ends ambiguously, with little having been resolved and its two central characters still on the run.32 Yet perhaps the most important feature of the novel is how it advances an idea Muñoz Molina had first introduced to his readers years earlier. Through a constant drip of non-Spanish cultural

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references, from Proust to Borges, from Humphrey Bogart to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, the novel perhaps most importantly mirrored the moral and cultural pedagogy Muñoz Molina had practiced in his early opinion column for the Diario de Granada.33 Critics especially appreciated the onslaught of cultural references. Some praised the novel’s “dark lyricism,” while others called it “original and autonomous.”34 Still others described it as “a thriller with the rhythm of a jam session.”35 Literary scholars followed suit. The novel, some argued, was of a piece with the traditions of Hollywood film noir and the Spanish novela negra.36 But it was not, scholars have almost universally maintained, politically conscious in any meaningful way. In fact, for many academic readers, the novel earnestly captured the apolitical milieu of early post-Franco Spanish society, especially in its portrayal of consumer-individualist ethos and self-destructive sexual pursuits. Although these readings are persuasive, something else is going on at the level of the novel’s structure. In fact, the novel uses structural arrangements in order to make particular political claims. We can begin to see these claims once we turn our attention to setting, specifically to the differences between the novel’s treatment of Portugal and Spain, the two major settings for the novel. Portugal is depicted as a fully modern Western democracy. Spain, by contrast, still has some way to go. Part of this delay, the novel tells us, has to do with nostalgia. The argument about Spanish society’s detrimental nostalgia occurs through the structural contrast in the novel between the reconstructed love affair in Spain and the presentism driving both the suspenseful plot and hyperconsumerism in Portugal. The first, the novel suggests, is outdated; the second is contemporary. The same contrasting structure is used to advance the idea that Spanish culture relies too heavily on imitation. While at the club in San Sebastián, Biralbo, the pianist, mostly plays jazz piano’s most popular melodies, to the point of eliding the difference between the original and his copy. Yet upon reaching Lisbon, he is inspired by Lucrecia to develop new music based on Cézanne’s impressionist art. Spain, we are led to



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believe, encourages artistic complacency, which results in works that are imitative, superficial, and ultimately derivative. Portugal, meanwhile, stands in for the promise of globalization, inspires aesthetic innovation, producing art that is at once nuanced, experimental, and original. The novel even politicizes the physical acts of sitting down or walking along these lines. While the protagonist spends hours sitting at his piano in Spain, in Portugal he is constantly on the move, crisscrossing Lisbon by foot, recalling the urban Robinson of Muñoz Molina’s column who walks the city streets without going anywhere in particular. Walking, in fact, was an early pedagogical feature of Muñoz Molina’s column writing. In the mid-1980s, he dedicated a column for the magazine Ideal to theorizing about perambulation in the Portuguese capital.37 “To walk,” he writes, “is an exercise of loyalty, not to oneself or to anyone else, but to the biography that the city writes for us . . . as if we were characters in a book that advances the idea of blindly feeling one’s way along the fate of a blank page that has already been written in the imagination.”38 Just as he does with the protagonist in El invierno en Lisboa, who upon arriving in Lisbon begins walking aimlessly in search of his onetime lover, Muñoz Molina brings the city’s background into the foreground through what might be called “infrastructural realism”—that is, when narrative intrigue centers on the supposedly fixed urban setting of the story instead of on the protagonist who drives its plot. Over the course of Muñoz Molina’s novel, the city of Lisbon remakes the reader, often surprisingly, in its own image. Once we reach the end of the novel, our loyalty lies neither with Biralbo, the protagonist, nor with Lucrecia, his love interest, but rather with the city itself. Yet, in the eyes of some readers, Muñoz Molina’s anxiety to educate readers sometimes got the better of his novels. In the case of El invierno en Lisboa, this tension between service journalism and literature was perhaps most acutely observed by the writer Leopoldo Azancot, whose perch as a book critic for the newspaper ABC meant his criticism could not be taken lightly. Azancot’s sensitivity to novel writing that incorporated journalism was understandably high. A fellow native of Andalusia,

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he was a generation older than Muñoz Molina, yet he, too, had published journalism well before he began writing novels.39 Also like Muñoz Molina, he eventually became a regular political commentator and columnist.40 His own journalistic origin story is likely what led Azancot, in his review of the novel, to isolate a key tension at its heart: generic hybridity. Neither fully noir nor fully romance, El invierno en Lisboa, he wrote, “becomes a hybrid work, too unreal to be taken seriously and too ambitious to be read with ease.” Generic hybridity of this sort is a staple of op-ed novels, which in different ways attempt to straddle the line between fiction and nonfiction. The novel’s factual ambiguity at the level of prose writing can often bleed over into indecision at the level of genre. The tension between genres, Azancot argued, had its clearest effect on readers, who might reject the novel’s experimentation and thus not learn from it, as Muñoz Molina had hoped. “El invierno en Lisboa,” Azancot continued, “is the book of a writer, an intellectual, not of a novelist. . . . Will he [Muñoz Molina] ever become a good novelist or will he settle for continuing to write books that are successful among intellectuals?” His answer: “The latter is most likely.”41

Novel Arguments In 1990, on the heels of the success of El invierno en Lisboa, Muñoz Molina landed a biweekly column in El País.42 The newspaper had hired many novelists to write for its opinion pages, but it had not yet cultivated its own novelist intellectuals. All the literary figures who collaborated with the paper in its early years were already established writers. During the 1970s and 1980s, the paper’s op-ed page featured a rotating cast of some of the world’s most recognizable novelists, including Cristina Peri Rossi, Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Carlos Fuentes, and Juan Carlos Onetti, among others. The paper also published opinion pieces by Juan Goytisolo, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Juan Benet, and other towering figures of Spanish literature. At the same time, as the most widely read newspaper in Spain and the only national daily to represent the left side



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of the political spectrum, El País was primed to turn a onetime bestselling young novelist like Muñoz Molina into an intellectual. The paper could offer him thousands—if not tens of thousands—of readers each week, ample opportunity to showcase his ability to opine on matters of public concern, and the kind of platform that could drive attention toward the topics he most cared about. In becoming a national columnist at such an early moment in his writing career, Muñoz Molina essentially received an education at El País in being a public intellectual. For his part, Muñoz Molina helped the paper change its image: no longer the home of an intellectual collective of like-minded friends, the paper gradually became, like the youth academy for a soccer team, the place to develop new intellectual talent. Within two and a half years, Muñoz Molina’s biweekly column had become a weekly column. It would not take long for Muñoz Molina to use his column to take on the novelist intellectual establishment. In 1994, with a column titled

2.2  From left to right, El País columnists Juan José Millás (novelist), Eduardo Haro Tecglen, Javier Marías (novelist), Manuel Rivas (novelist), and Antonio Muñoz Molina (novelist), at a reception commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the paper in 1996. Photo by Santos Cirilo. © El País

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“Teoría del elogio insultante” (Theory of the insulting compliment), he took aim at perhaps the most established of all novelist intellectuals, Camilo José Cela. The column accused Cela and his inner circle of acolytes, which included Francisco Umbral and his fellow columnistturned-novelist Raúl del Pozo, of using their public praise of literary works as a veiled threat. “Unlike the common reader, the vicious man of letters,” he wrote, referencing Cela, “appears only able to feed his capacity to admire with the vindictive energy of rejection.” According to Muñoz Molina, Cela and those in his circle would publicly praise a novelist one day in order to justify publishing a scathing review of their book the next, attempting to make that novelist’s fall from grace that much more spectacular. Their tactics, however, would ultimately prove ineffective. “What bothers the incorruptible columnists as well as Camilo José Cela’s lackeys,” he explained, “is the natural law by virtue of which new generations have irrupted in Spanish literature, guilty of the involuntary audacity of being worthy of attention from readers, and of calling into question the cavernous hierarchy where each of them was taking a siesta, as if they had . . . permanent jobs being doomsayers or geniuses.”43 Cela took umbrage the only way he knew how: through deflection, insults, and graphic humor. In his own op-ed for ABC the following day, Cela attempted to ironically reproduce the tactic of which he had been accused, calling Muñoz Molina a “sharp,” “lyrical lad” before shifting gears to insults. “That dumb little squire who declares himself to be the caudillo of the famous 150 [novelists of the Moncloa],” he wrote, referring to Muñoz Molina, “will not give up his [moralizing] attitude even while he continues to suck milk, honey, and other gifts from the plentiful and charitable udder of [the Spanish national] budget.”44 Though Muñoz Molina didn’t return the volley, the exchange with Cela underscored his desire to inculcate a journalistic form of balance in the public sphere. Too often, in Muñoz Molina’s view, famous writers of an earlier generation, such as Cela, promoted a novelist-intellectual persona that pontificated from on high, dismissed other writers with insults, and communicated smug elitism to readers. This intellectual persona



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tended toward the extremes: empty praise or vicious criticism. There was no in-between. Promoting balance, even-handedness, and earnest opinions over insolence, ridicule, and mudslinging, Muñoz Molina sought to change the then-dominant view of the country’s novelist intellectuals. Soon he would have the platform from which to change this perception. In 1995, with only a handful of novels to his name, Muñoz Molina became the youngest member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Spain’s equivalent of the Académie Française, the Academy was the country’s most exclusive academic institution, having a limited membership of at most forty-six members at any given time. Muñoz Molina’s meteoric rise was due primarily to his critical literary acclaim, having won a second National Literature Prize in 1992 for his novel El jinete polaco. But it was also partly due to his regular presence in the public sphere. As the scholar Joseba Gabilondo observed not more than a decade after his induction, Muñoz Molina “has come to represent . . . the ideal cultural and literary ‘personaje’ that every Spanish or Hispanic cultural institution seeks.”45 The following decades would prove the prescience of Gabilondo’s observation time and again. In his induction speech at the Academy, where he spoke about the exiled Spanish writer Max Aub, Muñoz Molina took the opportunity to underscore his indebtedness to journalism. He described the protagonist of his Aub-inspired novel Beatus Ille as “a Republican and vanguard novelist who was born the same year as Max Aub and that, more than once, would meet with him [Aub] in cafés and newspaper editorial offices.” Aub’s imaginary, novelistic biography, Jusep Torres Campalans (1958), Muñoz Molina confessed, “gave me the idea to invent a photo in which my fictional novelist appears alongside Manuel Altolaguirre and Rafael Alberti in the editorial offices of the magazine El mono azul.”46 Although it may seem strange for a novelist to use such a platform to highlight the centrality of journalism to his creative work, Muñoz Molina likely knew the association would play well with his audience. From the second half of the nineteenth century onward, the Academy had welcomed literary writers who were also journalists into its ranks,

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regularly including a significant number among its members.47 The openness of the Academy to journalism stemmed, in part, from the periodical having been the primary venue for literary publishing in the nineteenth century. Alongside cuadros de costumbres, short prose narratives depicting the everyday life of particular regions, other nineteenth-century prose genres such as the serial novel, crónicas (chronicles), and leyendas (legends) helped solidify a connection between the press and Spanish literature that would carry through the twentieth- and into the twentyfirst century.48 Yet that openness to journalism also concealed a literary elitism toward journalists, especially opinion journalists, that even Muñoz Molina himself struggled to navigate. “I prefer to narrate rather than opinionate,” Muñoz Molina once said about his weekly column for El País.49 Although narrating and opinionating are typically seen as opposites, in Muñoz Molina’s oeuvre they name complementary ways of making political arguments. From the late 1990s through the late 2000s, Muñoz Molina’s novels opined through a form of narration that appeared tailor-made to influence public opinion. Some scholars have called this his realist period.50 Yet realism doesn’t quite capture just how invested in reality these novels were. The period includes such novels as Plenilunio (Full moon), which tells the story of a former detective who was traumatized by ETA violence. The novel could not have been timelier: it was published in March 1997, when tensions between the Basque separatist group and the Spanish state were high and just months before the notorious kidnapping and assassination of the young conservative politician Miguel Ángel Blanco. Another novel of the period, Sefarad, narrates a series of cross-cultural histories of exile in twentieth-century Europe; it appeared in 2001, just when intellectuals across the globe were taking stock of the violent century that had recently come to an end.51 In 2009, La noche de los tiempos (In the Night of Time), a novel about the Spanish Civil War told through flashbacks, arrived on bookstands amid debates over the implementation of Spain’s 2007 Historical Memory Law, which recognized the victims of Francoist repression during the Civil War and dictatorship. Each of these novels made a calculated political intervention



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into the debates of the era, which, in the eyes of some critics, devalued their aesthetic achievements. As one critic put it, “Despite being a ‘novel of ideas,’ [La noche de los tiempos] lacks a challenging political and ethical imperative for the present.”52 Yet one novel in particular, Como la sombra que se va (Like a Fading Shadow), published shortly after this realist period, captured how a novel that might also be dismissed as a “novel of ideas” was, in fact, making an opinionated argument on current affairs through literary form. Published in 2014, Como la sombra que se va narrates a two-part story. One part of the story reimagines James Earl Ray’s ten-day stint in Portugal in the spring of 1968, following his assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The other part reconstructs, in memoir-like fashion, Muñoz Molina’s own two visits to Lisbon: one in 1987, when he began researching El invierno en Lisboa, and another in 2012, when he began work on the current book. The novel’s two parts are told mostly through alternating chapters: one on Ray’s fugitive spell in Lisbon, another on one of Muñoz Molina’s research trips. The half of the novel that is about Ray reads like an FBI file. It is chock-full of all kinds of information. Some information is of the seemingly banal kind, such as, “At 2:45 p.m. on April 29th, he was having lunch at Glenn’s Bakery and Coffee Shop in Crescent City, California.”53 Other bits of information amount to minor details, like Ray’s room number at the Hotel Portugal.54 Still other information we encounter can only be charitably described as tangential: at one point, for instance, we are informed that Lisbon has a curious dearth of laundromats and hot dog stands.55 All of this detail, we learn in a final reader’s note, has been harvested from a range of sources: radio and television interviews, Ray’s own memoirs, FBI archives, and countless books. “Trivial yet exact details give a misleading sense of omniscience,” the novel’s narrator writes of Ray’s creeping paranoia.56 Beware, the reader is warned: “The past is full of exotic minutiae.”57 Despite this research, Como la sombra que se va leaves readers in the dark about much of Ray’s fugitive travels. For instance, we find out little about his stays in Toronto and London, which bookended his short visit to Portugal. We also don’t hear about his plans to seek protection from

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extradition in Angola, Rhodesia, or South Africa. “There is an exact equivalence between the lack of information and mystery,” the narrator tells us.58 Much of the information in the novel—meals, room numbers, hot dog stands—is factual. Its inclusion allows the novel to tap into the long history of detective fiction and its narrative habit of documentation. Yet reading the novel only against the backdrop of literary and cultural history blinds us to the political claim it makes amid Spain’s ongoing culture war over historical memory. Muñoz Molina’s novel, in this sense, is not terribly interested in questions of representation— that is, of depicting experiences, perspectives, and situations that are given short shrift in the culture at large. Rather, it is interested in wielding documentation as a political stance against the flimsy factual basis of individual and collective memory. In Muñoz Molina’s novel, the purpose of accumulating so many facts goes well beyond partaking in a tradition of detective fiction; more importantly, it makes visible the amount of historical research it took to create the novel itself. The novel’s obsessive attention to historical documents—and its concern with making the reader aware of its use of archival sources—is Muñoz Molina’s way of taking sides in an ongoing debate over the meaning of history and memory in Spain. The foregrounding of historical research in Como la sombra que se va is thus not a disinterested narrative tool. Rather, the opposition the novel sets up between historical memory and historical research parallels a prominent argument in Spain that pits historical research based on archival sources against the historical memory movement, whose methods involve oral history. Muñoz Molina, in this novel and elsewhere, takes the side of what he sees as document-based historical work. By the end of Como la sombra que se va, readers come to realize how the half of the novel about James Earl Ray has been written like an obsessive investigative documentary while the other half, about Muñoz Molina himself, is impressionistic, emotional, and ultimately blurry about historical details. One half is told by a reliable narrator, the other half is not. In juxtaposing these two halves, the novel makes the case that personal recollections are not a legitimate source for historical



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knowledge. Since memories cannot be trusted to accurately reconstruct the information contained in historical documents, memoir should therefore be discounted as a method for examining history in any meaningful way. Personal accounts, the novel argues, only feed nostalgia and misinformation. In the world of the novel, first-person storytelling is best reserved for matters of love, aesthetics, and anecdotes, not for the weighty questions of history. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, debates over historical memory versus documented history raged across the Spanish public sphere. Muñoz Molina’s contribution to these debates via fiction supported the conclusions of a number of outspoken historians, most notably those of Santos Juliá, a fellow columnist for El País and one of the country’s most recognizable public intellectuals. Discounting oral history, ethnography, or other experience-based methods, Juliá believed that true historical research was only that which relied on documentary evidence, especially if it came from an archival source. Historical memory, he argued, was selective in its approach. It focused on individuals rather than on institutions, or on a person’s connection to specific historical moments rather than on a representative or comprehensive historical account. The individualistic flavor of much historical memory research, for Juliá, made it uniquely vulnerable to partisanship— legitimating, rehabilitating, celebrating, or condemning rather than disinterestedly analyzing its object of study. Rather than replicate the subjectivity and selectivity of historical memory, academic historians, in Juliá’s view, ought to follow “the requirement of totality and objectivity.”59 Juliá’s argument about objectivity in history runs into a number of issues, the most glaring of which are its simplistic assumptions about documents and archives. Despite Juliá’s reverence for archives, many archives contain the very oral-historical, epistolary, artistic, and other materials that he wished to discredit as subjective and partial. And despite his idealized view of the kinds of documents found in archives, such documents are no less prone to error than any other kind of historical sources. For years, scholars challenged Juliá on these and

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similar issues in the academic and public spheres.60 Yet throughout his career, Juliá equivocated. He left open-ended what he thought counted for objectivity, not specifying where he drew the line between interpretation and partiality. Nor did he ever specify the threshold of evidence required for a work of history to be considered sufficiently rigorous. Yet Juliá’s erroneous assumptions did not stop at the archive. They seeped into his account of the historical memory movement itself. The movement encouraged Spaniards to speak to their parents, grandparents, and other elders about what had occurred during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent fascist dictatorship. But, in Juliá’s view, this is all that they did, and nothing more. The reality is that the movement did more, much more. Historical memory associations across Spain have, since their inception, employed archaeologists and historians, who have worked with all kinds of archives, which hold an array of documents ranging from administrative records to property registries to maps—the very documents that, in Juliá’s view, give rise to objective historical research.61 Muñoz Molina’s argument against historical memory was not as straightforward as Juliá’s. The novel, Como la sombra que se va, does not contain any explicit references to the historical memory debates, and the task of historical reconstruction in the novel is, after all, ultimately undertaken by an amateur, not a professional historian. Yet the novel’s opposition between documentary history and historical memory comes alive in its structure. It treats memory as the site of rumor, nostalgia, and emotion, and history as the communication of facts, research, and authority. Muñoz Molina’s literary intervention is to claim that the movement, as its name suggests, relies on memories and not on hard facts. And so, despite focusing on the United States and being set in Portugal, Como la sombra que se va is ultimately a commentary on current affairs in Spain. Muñoz Molina’s novel did not emerge directly from the op-ed page, but it was nonetheless a creature of opinion journalism. The structural dichotomy in the novel between history and memory partakes in what in journalism is called bothsidesism, or the false equivalence between



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two views on an issue. The novel itself performs fairness by giving equal space to memory and history—quite literally through the structure of alternating chapters. Yet equal space does not mean equal presentation. The novel strongly favors one side of the argument—the historical side—over the other. By representing each side equally in structure but privileging one side in content, the novel creates a false equivalence. This kind of structural dichotomy that appears to give equal weight to both sides of a political argument amounts to what I will later in this book call “literary populism.”62 Though it might sound contradictory, fiction, too, can pine for journalistic objectivity. A balance of perspectives, generated through the literary form of alternating perspectives, creates an illusion of journalistic authority, legitimizing its own political claims over the matter being discussed. After all, the persuasiveness of political arguments hinges on the extent to which arguments appear to be disinterested. Yet even novels that try to present as unbiased, such as Como la sombra que se va, often fail to overcome their own Manichean frameworks. Had Muñoz Molina’s novel fairly represented both the history and memory sides of the argument, or had the novel abandoned this either-or framing altogether, the structural dichotomy would have broken down, rather than propped up, its idealistic views of history, documentation, and objectivity.

Periodical Disavowals At around the time of the novel on James Earl Ray, Muñoz Molina published the memoir Todo lo que era sólido (All that was solid). The memoir looked back at the mid-2000s, when, from 2004 to 2006, he directed the Instituto Cervantes in New York City, the Spanish government’s premier cultural center outside of Spain. The book was not typical of Muñoz Molina or of the memoir genre. In fact, it might charitably be described as the mea culpa of a public intellectual. It attempted to speak on behalf of intellectuals who, like him, had occupied prominent positions in government during Spain’s worst economic crisis since the days of Francoist autarky. At the time the

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memoir appeared on bookstands in 2013, youth unemployment in Spain surpassed 55 percent, overall unemployment hovered around 25 percent, and more than 525 evictions were occurring each day.63 Suicides had reached a twenty-five-year high, having increased by 20 percent since the beginning of what in Spain is simply known as “the crisis.”64 The crisis refers to what is elsewhere called the Great Recession, or the 2008 global financial crisis.65 In Spain, Muñoz Molina’s memoir was part of a short-lived trend of books by public figures reflecting on the mismanagement of the country’s economic boom as well as the subsequent economic crisis. The memoir’s timing was key. After the indignados movement in the summer of 2011, citizens were demanding answers as to why Spain had become complicit in a building binge that swept up countries across the globe, and some elites, Muñoz Molina included, complied.66 His memoir embraced the kind of self-criticism that might burnish an intellectual’s reputation for political independence. But its title referencing Marx and Engels’s famous line from The Communist Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into air,” gestured at greater political ambitions. After all, the attempt to signal solidarity to those suffering from unemployment, debt, and bleak job prospects was unmistakable. Todo lo que era sólido adopts a tripartite approach to narrating Spain’s economic crisis. As the scholar Sebastiaan Faber writes, “The book has three main objectives: to describe the excesses that took place in Spain during the . . . decades preceding the Great Recession; to explain how they occurred; and to convince the Spaniards to learn from their mistakes in order to build . . . a more civilized Spain—more prosperous, productive, and temperate; a country less barbaric . . . and less obsessed with the past.”67 Compared with other crisis memoirs, the book distinguishes itself in two ways: it exculpates the country’s poor and working classes from any role in Spain’s structural ills and makes good on its remorseful framing by apologizing for the recession. Yet the apology is neither personal nor solidaristic. Rather, it is nationalistic. “Without having arrived completely in modernity,” Muñoz Molina writes, “we became a postmodern country.”68 In other words, Spain’s



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skipping of historical stages was ultimately, if abstractly, to blame for the economic crisis. Talk about modernity has long been a sensitive subject for many intellectual elites in Spain. The trope of Spain’s perpetual condition of backwardness has a history that dates back at least to Montesquieu.69 That history, however, has also served as a nationalistic rallying cry to defend an idealized version of Spanish benevolence against an equally idealized version of Spanish malevolence.70 The invocation of Spanish backwardness sets the stage for Muñoz Molina’s reflections on his time as director of the Instituto Cervantes. In the memoir, he describes what appears to have been a frequent scene at the institution’s New York office during the height of Spain’s spending excesses: “Individuals with gifts of carbonated knowledge and chimeric qualifications received multimillion-euro subsidies to manage the administration of nothingness, which had been shrouded in large castles of words.”71 Muñoz Molina’s ironic tone lays bare the house of cards that was behind the office visits, where officials from different regions of Spain attempted to persuade him of the value of new, well-funded cultural spending initiatives. Muñoz Molina saw through this, but many in the government, he claims, did not. “While that was going on and no one in a position of power knew or wanted to know how to put an end to the dream,” he continues, “what occupied the newspapers and public debates was, above all, the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of the Second Republic and the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War.”72 What this situation implied about Spanish democracy was, for Muñoz Molina, far more troubling than millions of misspent euros. Rather than keep elites in check, the Spanish public sphere, he argued, had been captured by the “gratuitous phantasmagoria” of those “obsessed with the exhumation of mass graves.”73 Spanish backwardness thus takes on a rather literal meaning. In other words, for Muñoz Molina, Spain’s citizens were so busy trying to resolve the questions of the past that they completely missed the problems of the present. Only once Spain’s construction-driven economic boom came to an unceremonious

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end in 2008 was the farcical yet tragic nature of these multimillioneuro projects finally revealed. As this and other scenes illustrate, the book treats Spanish politics as a zero-sum game. One can either pay attention to the political machinations of government or relitigate historical episodes from more than half a century ago, but not at the same time. After all, citizens have only so much bandwidth. Such reasoning appears sound until one steps back for a moment to ask why keeping tabs on the government means ignoring how history informs our present, or vice versa. Are we really to believe that newspapers were not covering the daily grind of Spanish politics? What about the journalists and citizens who were paying attention? And, why, after all, are citizens ethically responsible for the actions of politicians anyway? The book does not ask, let alone answer, these kinds of questions. If one can draw any broad conclusion from its analysis, it is perhaps that those at the top of the country’s cultural institutions, such as Muñoz Molina, might have done more with their insider’s perspective. Although Todo lo que era sólido purports to explain how Spain became one of the Great Recession’s cautionary tales, it instead translates into nonfiction an argument against historical memory Muñoz Molina once championed in fiction. Muñoz Molina’s mea culpa helps us identify another common trope of novelist intellectual personae. When novelist intellectuals act selfcritically, they sometimes do so in the service of attempting to minimize what Noam Chomsky once called “the responsibility of intellectuals,” that is, the commitment to analyzing and exposing the actions of governments and other powerful institutions “according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”74 Taken to its extreme, this act of self-criticism can become a disavowal of one’s status as an intellectual. This is precisely what Muñoz Molina has done. Across his career, he has enacted this disavowal in a unique way, not shying away from the label of “intellectual,” unlike other celebrated novelists.75 Rather than reject the label, he has used it to burnish his credentials as a self-critic. In 2012, the journalist Emma Rodríguez asked him whether Spain needed more intellectuals to guide society through the wreckage



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of the Great Recession. “No, we shouldn’t trust intellectuals,” he responded. “The intellectual history of the twentieth century is full of madmen. Truly lucid and rational intellectuals have been few and far between: Orwell, Albert Camus, more recently Claudio Magris. What we need are citizens that exercise their citizenship by writing. . . . If our country has one sin it is an excess of opinionism.”76 Despite the clarity of the message, the reasoning remained ambiguous. Should intellectuals not be trusted because it is difficult to distinguish true intellectuals from false prophets? Should they not be trusted because, à la Gramsci, the “function” of an intellectual does not make anyone more of an intellectual than anyone else?77 Or are there other reasons altogether for distrusting intellectuals? Readers would have to wait another six years for answers. When, in a follow-up interview on the topic, Muñoz Molina was pressed on what he had meant when he said we shouldn’t trust intellectuals, he again turned to self-criticism. “For me,” he said, “the French model of the intellectual, generally masculine, reflects great arrogance, given that what it communicates is that the fact of writing books gives one a privileged view of political reality. On the contrary, I think that when we think about politics, we do so with the stupidest part of ourselves. . . . I think the political nonsense said by a writer, whether large or small, is not justified by their work.”78 The argumentative move here is clear. By dismissing the political commentary of writers as nonsensical, Muñoz Molina separates a writer’s political opinions from their literary work. Political opinions and literary writing, he reasons, have nothing to do with one another, even when they come from the same person; to think they are related is to deliberately conflate apples and oranges. What is odd about Muñoz Molina’s view is that it fosters a peculiar form of anti-intellectualism. Separating art from politics purposefully misdirects readers away from art’s layered relationship with society. That Muñoz Molina asserts this privilege is not in itself noteworthy. Countless writers before him have done the same, as will countless writers to come—some out of honest conviction, others to ward off inquiry and critique. This assertion performs the very self-critical conceit

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that gives novelists intellectual legitimacy. By communicating sympathy for constraints on thought, Muñoz Molina proves his independent credentials to his readers. After all, as an intellectual, what could be more self-critical than placing constraints on one’s own thought? Such a view, however, belies an ulterior motive. It polices what counts as legitimate opinion. It attempts to defang the critic’s ability to examine fiction and nonfiction together by claiming that one has nothing to do with the other. Yet it also reveals where some of the deepest anxieties of the novelist intellectual lie.79 The ability to blend fiction and nonfiction remains an important prerogative of op-ed novelists and other writers who wish to make their fiction relevant to current affairs. Equally important to asserting that prerogative is preserving it, and the most straightforward way to preserve it is by shaping how one’s fiction is read. Public pronouncements in memoirs, interviews, and opeds often shape how novels are interpreted by journalists, literary critics, editors, and others, that is, by people in a position to advance or undermine an author’s own view of their fiction. Indeed, numerous scholars have questioned the prerogative to blend fiction and nonfiction. They have discovered in Muñoz Molina’s fiction a reliance on cliché, poor logic, and arbitrary evidence in support of political claims made under the cover of literature.80 What becomes clear by reading his nonfiction is that it, too, participates in this political project, and, like his literary works, it, too, is read by a sizable audience. Not only is it possible that the shoddy claims in his fiction writing have stemmed from the faulty reasoning in his opinion writing, it is also likely he has used nonfiction to shore up political claims made in his fiction. “More than once has a topic I have treated in a column later become a topic I have treated in a book,” Muñoz Molina has explained.81 If he himself has drawn attention to the link between his op-eds and his novels, why shouldn’t we?

Oiling the Machine The first aphorism in Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street ends with a comment on the role of opinion in modern society. “Opinions,”



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Benjamin writes, “are to the monstrous apparatus of social life what oil is to machines: one would not stand in front of a turbine and pour oil all over it. Instead only a little is applied to the hidden spindles and joints whose locations must be known [in advance].”82 Benjamin’s eloquent metaphor is purposefully incomplete. There is no actor, no opinion maker. No one performs the labor of oiling the machine—that is, of producing opinions to keep social life going. Who, then, has the ability to pour the oil to lubricate such a monstrous apparatus? In Spain, novelist intellectuals have claimed this ability for themselves. But not without struggle. For some observers, novelist intellectuals have by and large fallen short of fulfilling Muñoz Molina’s pedagogical vision for the opinion column. In 2016, the debate over how valuable novelists actually were as intellectuals came to a head following the publication of political scientist Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca’s polemic La desfachatez intelectual (Intellectual impudence).83 The book, which examined the public opinions of several of Spain’s most prominent literary intellectuals, set off what a pair of prominent online newspapers called “a long-delayed debate,” one which would eventually last nearly a year and crisscross newspapers and magazines across the country.84 Sánchez-Cuenca did not mince words about what he saw as the shortcomings of literary intellectuals. “The discourse of men of letters and essayists,” he wrote, “remains anchored in a perennial national quarrel and, when it goes beyond this framework, it shuttles between vagaries and commonplace statements that reveal a worrying ignorance about how politics and the economy work.”85 For Sánchez-Cuenca, who had himself been a columnist for El País on and off for two decades, literary intellectuals often “do not bother to find out what is known about certain subjects, nor what is thought about them outside our [national] borders.”86 This led to a way of arguing, he explained, that was at once stylistically arrogant yet intellectually frivolous. Rather than contribute knowledge and understanding, literary intellectuals, he observed, frequently asserted their place in the public sphere by way of celebrity status rather than learned accomplishment, or even minimal analytic competence. What was most concerning to Sánchez-Cuenca was that these unqualified opinion makers were rarely, if ever, taken to task for

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their indiscretions. The lack of checks and balances had an important knock-on effect. Thanks to their perches atop the columnist hierarchy, such intellectuals, he argued, had potentially forestalled the development of a healthy culture of public debate in Spain. Muñoz Molina was a central target of the book. His columns, Sánchez-Cuenca argued, “are mostly based on contrasting the moral values he embodies with the betrayal of those values by an ignorant and visionless part of the political class, which condemns Spain to remaining in a secular state of backwardness.”87 Characterized by pontification over analysis, Muñoz Molina’s observations, he said, contributed little to our understanding of how that political class actually worked, or even to how public morality ought to consider such ignorant and visionless politicians. Instead, situations in which powerful politicians made decisions about how to spend millions of euros were reduced to the personal failings of treasonous individuals. Had he received training in the relevant fields, Sánchez-Cuenca suggested, he might have steered readers toward a broader and more sophisticated understanding of politics, economics, and the ongoing crisis. Sánchez-Cuenca was not the first to make this kind of charge against Spain’s novelist intellectuals.88 But he has been the one to articulate the overarching criticism most clearly and succinctly. The basic idea is straightforward: literary writers make for poor intellectuals, SánchezCuenca and other critics argue, because they regularly comment on matters outside their field of expertise. Thus, novelists make for bad intellectuals because they opine on issues they know little about. This criticism seems sensible. Yet, when taken to its extreme, it quickly devolves into absurdity. Novelists writing only about literature, economists writing only about economics, physicists writing only about physics: the kind of public sphere that would result from having experts only speak about their expertise, and not about matters of general public concern, would bear a striking resemblance to academia. Indeed, Sánchez-Cuenca’s talk about “rules” and “analytical rigor” in column writing envisions a public sphere populated by scholarly specialists such as himself.89 More than that, it envisions a public sphere in which



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humanistic approaches to nonhumanistic fields could perhaps be excluded altogether.90 Academia is not, and cannot be, the public sphere. That much is clear. Yet this criticism of novelist intellectuals is symptomatic of other reasons why observers like Sánchez-Cuenca dislike their presence in the public sphere. One of those reasons is that novelist intellectuals and other opinion makers have been given a very long leash in Spain. For decades, novelist intellectuals have operated with relative professional impunity, taking advantage of an editorial tendency at many publications to value writerly style more than intellectual substance. Such missteps, however, should not license the wholesale exclusion of novelists from the public sphere. To do so, limiting the public sphere only to specialist opinion, is to misunderstand the past and present role of intellectuals in society.91 While knowledge and competence play a significant role in how we ought to think about such figures, critics such as Sánchez-Cuenca overlook perhaps the most fundamental source of public intellectual legitimacy: readers. “Though the public intellectual is a political actor,” writes the political theorist Corey Robin, “what differentiates her from the celebrity or publicity hound is that she is writing for an audience that does not yet exist. Unlike the ordinary journalist or enterprising scholar, she is writing for a reader she hopes to bring into being.”92 If many columns by novelist intellectuals appear intellectually frivolous yet stylistically arrogant, perhaps it is not so much because their authors lack expertise but rather because they cannot imagine a new kind of reader. Two major views have come to dominate thinking about novelist intellectuals in Spain.93 The first affirms the purity of literary writing. “Regarding the relationship between journalism and literature,” writes the scholar Encarna Alonso Valero, “the most typical trajectory is that columnists . . . begin their careers in literature . . . and newspapers request their collaboration once they have become established or once they are on their way to consolidating their careers and occupying a prominent place in the literary sphere.”94 Alonso Valero’s account of novelist intellectuals is one of artistic purity. The writer begins as a

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writer and, once she has made a name for herself, lends her pen to other issues, retaining all the while her artistic merits. Journalistic writing, on this account, is subsequent and therefore secondary to the writing of literature. The second view of novelist intellectuals asserts the absolute power of marketing. “Media,” writes the scholar Ulrich Winter, “not only create and disseminate the images of writers in order to facilitate the sale of their books. A growing number of writers contribute to news­ papers in order to cultivate their public image as a writer and, thus, sustain their success.”95 On this account, the question whether novelists begin to write for newspapers once they’ve made their name is beside the point. Instead, the question to ask is why they write for newspapers at all, and the answer, according to Winter, is artistic commercialism. The writer is, from the very beginning, a brand. And the brand benefits by using opinion columns to sell books, books to establish celebrity, and celebrity to sustain itself. While the account of artistic purity suggests that a writer who collaborates with newspapers does so in order to lend the paper literary legitimacy, the account of artistic commercialism argues that the collaboration is primarily motivated by book sales. Both views accurately describe forces that shape opinion journalism and literature. But such dynamics are never quite as straightforward as they seem. Neither view addresses the question of why fiction authors would want to write opinion journalism, specifically. There are many easier ways to sell books, and the overwhelming majority of fiction writers go their entire careers without publishing much if any opinion journalism. Also left unexplained is why opinion journalism would serve as a good platform for advertising fiction, in the same way that it does for nonfiction. Furthermore, the idea that newspapers would somehow look to literature to acquire legitimacy, despite the centurieslong relationship between the two, makes little sense historically. Either the writer is a brand, or she is a source of legitimacy. Both of these views of the novelist intellectual have little patience for understanding the motivations and aims that go into each genre of writing, implying that readers themselves seem most interested in the author’s name—as



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a brand name or as a source of prestige. There is some truth to this. But whether readers are reading these works because of an ad campaign or because of the quality of the writing, their reasons for doing so seem immaterial to the accounts we have. These accounts, in other words, let writers off the hook. Alonso Valero, Winter, and other scholars of the novelist intellectual stop short of asking why these writers choose one genre over another—fiction or nonfiction—to shepherd their political claims into our public consciousness. Instead, they treat such decisions as arbitrary rather than voluntary. Yet nowhere is this stopping short clearer than in SánchezCuenca. “I submit Antonio Muñoz Molina’s ideas about the Spanish economic crisis to harsh criticism,” he writes, “but I do not evaluate his novels, which probably deserve the most enthusiastic praise.”96 Perhaps they deserve praise, or perhaps not. So long as critics of the novelist intellectual stop their analysis once the writer moves from opinion journalism to literature or vice-versa, we will never know. This separation, however, is untenable. Given the associations readers make between wherever an author’s name appears, whether in a newspaper byline or on the cover of a novel, it seems imperative that we understand how authors calibrate their public intellectual persona through both fiction and nonfiction writing. Choosing to write either fiction or nonfiction is neither an arbitrary nor an inconsequential decision. It is a voluntary and meaningful one. Only once we unearth the meaning of these distinctions will we be able to glimpse the process by which writers calibrate the mixture of fiction and nonfiction that best serves the particular argument they are trying to make in the public sphere.

Chapter 3

Persuasive Literary Thought

Javier Marías had had enough of nationalist sycophants calling for the Nobel Prize in Literature to be given to Camilo José Cela, “the best living Spanish writer.”1 No longer able to hold in his frustration, in the fall of 1987, just weeks after the exiled Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky had won the Nobel, Marías took to the opinion page of the newspaper Diario 16 to ridicule the national circus surrounding the annual prize. “Every year in the month of October,” he wrote, “the newspapers and magazines of this country reserve a space . . . for literary critics and the random onlooker to request, irately or dolefully, that they give the prize to Cela.”2 The ritual was tired, but so, too, Marías thought, was the man at its center. Spain’s so-called best living writer, he would recall years later, was also the country’s “official literary jackass.”3 Cela had decorated his public persona with headline-seeking proclamations and plagiarizing tendencies.4 “What celebrated and award-winning novel by a Nobel Prize–winner silently copies in its opening and penultimate page from . . . Joyce’s Dubliners?” Marías inquired. “If I ask,” he continued, “it is because not one single critic pointed this out at the time, perhaps, implausibly, out of ignorance, or collusion.”5 In addition to being the country’s best living writer, Cela, these onlookers claimed, was also the only Spanish writer known outside the country. For that reason, they argued, he was the only author with a chance to win the Nobel. For Spain’s patriotic literary critics, wrote Marías, “the ten years that have passed since the award went to [the Spanish poet Vicente] Aleixandre appear to be twenty.” None of this 86



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national myopia came as a surprise to Marías. Spain was, after all, he explained, a country with a “decidedly monotheistic vocation: there’s one soccer team, one newspaper, one political party, one television [station], and, of course, one king.” Cela, in other words, was “our Only Writer.”6 Although such literary nationalism was standard fare in Spain, that year, Marías felt, things had gotten out of hand. As he wrote in his column, the press had not only published its usual propaganda; it had also begun making false claims about the awarding of the Nobel itself. Based on anonymous sources, some in the press claimed that if the president of Costa Rica had not won the Nobel Peace Prize just days earlier, Cela would have certainly received the prize for literature— ignoring the fact that the Peace and Literature prizes are awarded by different committees in different countries. According to Marías, the press had given far too much credence to the accusation that the Nobel committees had colluded to allow only one Spanish-speaking winner per year. But the collusion, he said, had come from another source— namely, Cela himself, who had spurned journalists to run with baseless claims, theories, and speculation. Responses to Marías’s piece soon poured into the editorial offices of Diario 16. Writing under the pseudonym Matilde Penalonga, the literary critic and future president of the Royal Spanish Academy Darío Villa­ nueva denounced in a letter to the editor what he saw as Marías’s “flagrant inaccuracy” and “pseudoarguments.”7 Manuel Hidalgo, the newspaper’s own film critic, concurred, writing in his own column that Marías’s op-ed amounted to “sophism and subtly elitist libel.”8 Ultimately, wrote writer and journalist Juan José Armas Marcelo in his own contribution, the piece on Cela exposed Marías’s own “immaturity” and “maliciousness.” “Trying to kill a lion when one is simply a weekend goldfinch hunter is a bold risk, to say the least,” he continued. “To kill Cela by turning reality inside out reveals the foolish workings of he who clumsily attempts to do so.”9 Marías, these critics thought, had gone too far. He himself was guilty of baseless speculation when, in a follow-up piece, he claimed that the speculation about Cela nearly winning the Nobel had only been reported in Spain. That claim could easily

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be disproven: the news about Cela had also been reported in none other than the New York Times. “This year, according to some accounts,” read the corresponding Times article, “Mr. Brodsky won out over a list of finalists including Mr. Naipaul, Octavio Paz, a Mexican critic and poet, and the reputed runner-up, Camilo Jose [sic] Cela, a Spanish poet born in 1916.”10 For Marías, the Times article proved his point. Any careful reading of it would support his claim that all the commotion over Cela was pure speculation. Consider the use of “reputed,” he noted: the article never asserted as fact that Cela was runner-up, just that some believed he was but could not say so with any certainty. What’s more, Marías argued, the article curiously described Cela as “a Spanish poet,” thus confirming that Cela was far from a well-known writer outside of Spain. If anything, Cela was a famous novelist, not a famous poet. With these argumentative moves, Marías revealed his critics’ sloppiness, pointing out where they mistook speculation for fact, or references for knowledge. Marías would return to these kinds of distinctions time and again over the years, in both fiction and nonfiction. The strategy would become the bulwark of arguments he would make against some of Spain’s most notable intellectuals. At the end of his column on Cela for Diario 16, Marías alluded that there was more to come. He could take Cela and other objectionable literary figures to task for their indiscretions, but, he wrote, “I also don’t want to waste my stones.”11

Novelist Intellectual à l’Envers The stones Marías did throw at Cela missed their target: two years later, in 1989, Cela would go on to win the Nobel Prize. But what other stones did Marías have in his back pocket? And who were his other targets? Over the course of the next two decades, readers would learn the answers to both questions. They would also learn that Marías’s disdain for Cela had little to do with his tendency to grab headlines, plagiarize Joyce, or act like a jackass. It ran much deeper. For Marías, Cela was the most prominent example of the unseemly tendency among some of



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Spain’s most esteemed postwar intellectuals to hide their history of collaboration with the Franco regime. Some even hid their collaborationism behind a veil of progressive politics. In both novels and opinion writing over the course of four decades, Marías would expose the dark histories of many such intellectuals who were not forced to collaborate with the regime, as one might assume, but did so voluntarily. Cela was at the center of this collaborationist tendency. Earlier in 1987, before the publication of Marías’s op-ed, Cela had appeared on French public television to talk about subjects ranging from politics to literature to wine. When the conversation turned to the Franco regime, Olivier de Marliave, the France 3 host, asked Cela, “In those not-sodistant times, when many intellectuals were censored, were you also subjected to the regime’s bans?” “Like all Spaniards,” Cela confirmed, before citing the censorship of his novels La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte, 1942) and La colmena (The Hive, 1950). “But all of that is ancient history. . . . Evidently, it was a very difficult time for us. But it’s no less evident that, if one wants to work, one works.”12 To many in the Spanish intellectual scene, where rumors about Cela’s own voluntary service on the side of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War had circulated for years, that last line would have sounded like a provocation. Many suspected that despite the suppression of his work, Cela had worked as a longtime censor for the Franco regime.13 By the time of the interview on France 3, the rumors had begun to crystallize into evidence.14 Cela had indeed collaborated with the regime. After Francoist archives opened in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars, journalists, and writers uncovered evidence showing that, in 1938, in the midst of the Civil War, Cela had voluntarily offered his services to become a censor for the fascist intelligence services.15 Following the war, he continued his censorship work. Records showed that, from 1941 to 1945, he worked for the National Office of Press and Propaganda.16 “One might think that Cela began working for the office of Censorship of the Press with the goal of avoiding the threat of censorship for his own books,” writes Justino Sinova, the former editor of Diario 16. “But the truth is he did it to make

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ends meet.”17 As Cela himself privately admitted regarding his reasons for joining the office, “I didn’t know I was going to be a writer.”18 Yet rather than come clean about the murky, contradictory past that helped launch his writing career, Cela did everything he could to avoid it. Marías’s career-long preoccupation with duplicitous intellectuals began several years before he published his piece on Cela. It first came to light not in the opinion pages of a newspaper, as one might expect, but rather in his 1983 novel El siglo (The century), which marked Marías’s aesthetic shift toward the unique form of narrative digression and slow plotting that would give him international renown. The novel tells the story of a man named Casaldáliga who flees to Lisbon to avoid becoming ensnared by the nascent and unnamed Spanish Civil War. Though haunted by a desire to return home to fight, Casaldáliga’s appetite for heroism rings hollow and his lack of courage and perseverance keeps him away from the armed conflict. When he does eventually return in 1939, following the end of the war, he takes up work as an informant for the new fascist government. “With this novel,” Marías writes in the prologue to the 1995 edition, “I wanted, in part, to try to make sense of how celebrated or commendable people . . . could end up committing the greatest of all [evils] without apparently being ordered or forced to do it.”19 If the novel tells us anything about why noble people commit ignoble acts, it is that supposedly noble people like Casaldáliga deeply misunderstand the social and historical forces that shape their lives, which, in turn, leads them to misunderstand themselves. “In essence,” Casaldáliga admits in a fleeting moment of self-awareness, “I was never anybody.”20 El siglo best helps explain when and where Marías’s interest in the topic of the duplicitous intellectual comes from—namely, from his father’s experience as a result of the Spanish Civil War. When Franco launched his coup d’état, Julián Marías, Marías’s father, had just finished his bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the University of Madrid. He quickly joined the Republican side and put his language abilities to use, primarily translating documents for the Ministry of War.21 Once the war ended, rumors began circulating about his wartime work. In



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1939, one of his best friends accused him of working for Pravda. The false accusation was tantamount to a death sentence, yet he avoided capital punishment thanks largely to the testimony of Falangist and fellow student Salvador Lissarrague.22 He was ultimately handed a fourmonth prison sentence instead. Julián Marías would go on to become a well-known philosopher, yet his continued refusal to pledge allegiance to the fascist regime’s “fundamental principles” meant he was barred from holding a university post in Spain. Stories of betrayal, however, are rarely so straightforward. One of the two additional character witnesses whose favorable testimonies helped spare his life was none other than Camilo José Cela.23 Despite helping save his father’s life, Cela nonetheless became for Marías a paragon of the moral poverty of intellectuals. According to one observer, Marías dedicated no fewer than thirteen opinion columns during the 1990s and early 2000s to explicitly criticizing Cela.24 Add to that the number of veiled references to Cela in columns, interviews, short stories, and novels, and the number might balloon to several dozen.25 Many of the veiled references to Cela resemble the one that appears in Así empieza lo malo (Thus Bad Begins), Marías’s 2014 novel about divorce and domestic violence during Spain’s transition to democracy. The upscale Madrid neighborhood of Salamanca, where much of the novel takes place, is described as home to “all those professors, historians, novelists and painters who supported Franco and served him during the cruelest decades of his regime, and who, with passing time, once it was no longer dangerous, have declared themselves, nominally at least, to be left-wingers.”26 Yet, just as with the story of his father’s betrayal, however, Marías’s disparaging of Cela is also not straightforward. In 1994, following the publication of his eighth novel, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me), Marías had a falling out with Jorge Herralde, the director of the publishing house Anagrama.27 From that point forward, Marías began publishing his novels with Alfaguara, which was founded in 1964 by three brothers: Juan Carlos, Jorge, and Camilo José Cela.28

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By the time he was to undermine the reputation of Spain’s most celebrated postwar novelist, Marías had over two decades of op-ed writing under his belt. According to one study, by 2008 he had written more than a thousand pieces for the press—the overwhelming majority of which had been opinion columns.29 Marías’s nonfiction career began back in the mid-1970s, just as new newspapers and magazines were sprouting up across the country. In the first years of his career, Marías contributed pieces to a range of outlets, from Jano: Medicina y Humanidades, a magazine for medical professionals, to El País. His pieces appeared sporadically, and most involved literature and literary criticism. Following the 1981 coup d’état, however, Marías increasingly began to focus his efforts on opinion writing.30 During the late 1980s and early 1990s, his output of op-eds increased. Some readers began to take notice.31 Then, on December 4, 1994, while still in the afterglow of Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí yet in conflict with his editor Herralde, Marías inaugurated his first weekly column in El Semanal, a Sunday magazine that reached over a million readers across Spain.32 For the next three decades, and with few exceptions, he would continue to publish a column each and every Sunday. One of those exceptions occurred in 2002. That October, Marías resigned from his position after El Semanal refused to publish one of his weekly columns, which was highly critical of the Catholic Church.33 Following a day of negotiations, he returned to the magazine, which had agreed to publish the column several months later. However, after catching wind that the piece would not appear after all, Marías left the publication entirely.34 Just weeks after his resignation, Marías was offered a column at the weekend supplement El País Semanal, where he would go on to write for the next twenty years. Yet the incident at El Semanal stayed with Marías. It revealed to him that censorship was still operative in contemporary Spanish society. As the rest of this chapter will explore, Marías took it upon himself, across his literary and opinion writing, to warn fellow Spaniards that creeping censorship might plunge the country back into a dictatorship. If Muñoz Molina is the quintessential example of a writer who begins their career as an opinion journalist before becoming an acclaimed



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novelist, Marías is an example of precisely the opposite. Marías became a novelist in 1971, at the age of nineteen. That year, he published his first novel, Los dominios del lobo (The domain of the wolf ). His second novel, Travesía del horizonte (Voyage Along the Horizon) would appear just two years later. It would not be until the 1980s, when he already was a well-known fiction writer, that he would write his first op-ed. By the time he was given his first regular newspaper column, he was more than two decades into his literary career. But appearances can be deceiving. Though Marías began writing novels before columns, his trajectory as a novelist intellectual closely follows the Muñoz Molina script. As with Muñoz Molina, it was only after having written a celebrated novel that Marías landed a major op-ed column. Also like Muñoz Molina, a number of Marías’s novels have attempted to shape public opinion, a feature that can be glimpsed by his defense of those opinions in public. Finally, he has followed Muñoz Molina and other novelists in disavowing their responsibility as intellectuals. Marías’s journey through these benchmarks began, roughly, in 1989 with the publication of Todas las almas (All Souls). The novel launched Marías to worldwide fame and, a few years later, to his first major op-ed column, in El Semanal. Some years into his career as a columnist, Marías began to write novels aimed at shaping public opinion, including Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow, 2002–2007), his three-volume magnum opus and the central example I examine in this chapter. Unlike Muñoz Molina and other contemporaries, Marías’s disavowal of his responsibility as an intellectual has mostly been indirect and infrequent. “I lack a journalistic spirit,” says the narrator in Negra espalda de tiempo (Dark Back of Time), Marías’s 1998 autofictional novel.35 “My spirit may sometimes be detectivesque and thus deductive, but it is never, of course, journalistic or scholarly.”36 This statement partly attempts to steer readers away from seeing connections between the novel’s fictional world and our nonfictional one.37 It is also expresses Marías’s distaste for what he calls “the journalistic novel, which deals with things that are very much of the moment, like the Internet” and novels “that also sometimes coincide with journalism, . . . that are unassailable because they adopt a position that is unassailable, like violence

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against women.”38 Taking the pulse of the moment and foregrounding argumentative writing—the “journalistic novel” and novels that “coincide with journalism” both sound like different terms for the op-ed novel. It is not very surprising that Marías would disavow any kind of relationship with either tendency. What is perhaps more surprising is that, here and elsewhere, he appears to denigrate journalism in order to do so, guarding his literary writing against those who might be tempted to read it alongside his Sunday columns. What happens if we go against Marías’s prescription and read his novels alongside his opinion journalism? When we do, I argue in this chapter, we find his novels embracing features of argumentative nonfiction. This may sound surprising, given Marías’s status as one of the most original literary writers of Spain’s post-Franco period. However, from the 1980s onwards, Marías developed an interest in persuasion, especially in how persuasion works under adversarial conditions. When silence, deception, and hypocrisy rule society, whether as a result of fascism or shifting cultural mores, where does persuasion end and coercion begin? Marías’s fiction and nonfiction writing frequently turn on questions such as this one. People can be persuaded of anything, yet few, he speculated, could recognize the process by which their habits, desires, and knowledge were transformed by those around them, practically without notice. Exactly how this happens has a lot to do with our assumptions about who or what may be trying to persuade us. Marías brought this thinking into his fiction. He reasoned that one of our primary assumptions about literature is that it does not think but does. Action and plot reign supreme. But few had ever questioned whether this assumption was actually true. Marías’s attempt to turn this assumption on its head led him to spend part of the 1990s exploring what his father, Julián, had once called “literary thought.”

Literary Thought In the early 1990s, Marías began using the term pensamiento literario (literary thought) to theorize his own literary process. Literary thought,



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he explained in a 1992 op-ed for El País, was “unlike scientific or philosophical thought” in that “it is not subject to argument or proof—perhaps not even to persuasion. It does not depend on a reasoned, unifying thread, nor does it need to show each of its steps.” For him, the benefit was that literary thought could be deliberately contradictory. “Across different books or within the same one,” he explained, “a writer can say—or make his characters say—opposing things that, nonetheless, appear to be equally true.”39 Like philosophical and scientific thought, literary thought was in the business of finding truth. Unlike philosophical or scientific thought, however, literary thought was unconcerned with coherence. Literary representation, he argued, did not take sides, it did not favor one particular view of truth; rather, it represented truth in all its disjointedness. This lack of rigid logical constraints made literary thought less partisan, even if its contributions to knowledge became far more circuitous. That trade-off, for Marías, was one well worth making. The notion of “literary thought” had been important to Marías’s father, Julián Marías. Toward the end of his career, as Julián gradually shifted away from metaphysics and philosophy of religion, for which he was well known in Spain, and toward the study of ethics and sociology, literary thought seemed to blend a number of his new interdisciplinary interests. In fact, literary thought fascinated him so much that he planned on dedicating an entire book to the topic. During the 1982–1983 academic year, he laid the groundwork for that book in a seminar at the Instituto de España titled “Literary Thought in Twentieth-Century Spain.”40 “There is philosophical thought. There is scientific thought. There is technical thought. There is political thought,” he told his audience. “From the point of view of logic . . . there is, evidently, a hierarchy among them, they are more or less rational. . . . But they are thought, they are [all] forms of thought.”41 To these forms of thought, he argued, we ought to add another: literary thought. “Literature,” he said, “is made to orient oneself to reality, to interpret it, to understand it, not with a system of concepts as science does, or, in an even more rigorous way, as philosophy does,” but rather through “a form of clarifying reality, a form of making reality transparent.”42 With this, he attempted to give philosophical legitimacy to a nonphilosophical form of thought. Though he

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postponed the plans for a book on literary thought, his decision would not stop his son, Javier, from attempting to make his own inroads on the project.43 Over the next several decades, Javier Marías would add to and test out this theory of literary thought in interviews, essays, and, above all, opinion columns. Beginning with the 1992 op-ed, Marías set out in a series of columns and essays to develop his father’s concept of literary thought. As the concept evolved, its distance from other forms of thought grew. In an article published shortly after the death of the writer Juan Benet in 1993, Marías explained that literary thought often consisted of “bursts of disturbed thought that, if not entirely irrational, did not need to provide reasons in order to affirm and persuade.”44 These bursts gave literary thought its inconsistency, but they also allowed readers to identify truths more readily than the alienating step-by-step process of logical reasoning. “In their own representational world,” he wrote in a 1996 essay titled “Narrating the Mystery,” “these sometimes gratuitous and enigmatic propositions say and, what’s more, we frequently recognize what they say as true. . . . Unlike other types of thought . . . literary thought is a form of recognition.”45 Ultimately, as he argued in a 1997 piece, literary thought captures “forms of knowledge and intuition that cannot be expressed or recognized using language that is exclusively rational.”46 Not exclusively rational, however, did not mean irrational. It meant, for Marías, mixing rationality and irrationality to capture features of modern society that philosophy and science had overlooked. The nature of this mixing comes out most clearly in the ability of literary thought to embrace contradiction. “Unlike philosophical thinking, which demands an argument without logical flaws and contradictions,” Marías told the German literary critic Paul Ingendaay in a 2000 interview, “literary thinking allows you to contradict yourself. A character within a book can say two totally contradictory things, yet both can be true.”47 Literary thought, he explained, “produc[es] itself in flashes”— that is, through momentary philosophical reflections that occur in the novel.48 The reader associates these flashes with their own experience of reality, and the interplay between these two realities—the novel’s and



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the reader’s—yields what might be called literary truth. According to Marías, it is this search for truth, and the distinctive way in which it is realized, that puts literary thought on the same intellectual footing as philosophical or scientific thought. Or so we are meant to believe. Across all his articles on the concept, Marías was unclear about what made literary thought specifically literary. He seemed to assume that logical contradictions were somehow a distinctive feature of literature. However, such contradictions occur across many forms of reasoning, including scientific and philosophical thought. Most often, contradictions arise as a result of differences in perception. In fact, contradictions are such a fundamental feature of logical reasoning that one might even say identifying contradictions is one of the primary ways in which scientific and philosophical knowledge advances at all. Does any form of writing that produces a contradiction count as literary thought? Probably not. How do we know, then, that what we are reading is literature and not something else? For Marías, the answer appeared to be sociological: literature was that which claimed or was claimed to be literature, by the author, by readers, or by anyone else. Marías’s narrow attention to contradiction in literature is revealing. Rather than focus on contradiction as a way to distinguish literary thought from other forms of thought, he might have instead centered on commonalities. Why, for instance, call literature’s philosophical flourishes a form of ‘thought’? Without establishing what it shares with other forms of thought, literary thought ends up having a rather narrow application. Marías’s own use of the term, in this regard, is telling. Sometimes literary thought described the novels of his mentor Juan Benet, other times it described the work of John Keats or Thomas de Quincey. Most of the time, however, he used the concept to describe his own writing. Scholars and critics have been nevertheless happy to follow Marías’s lead.49 In 2001, the scholar Maarten Steenmeijer opened a collection titled El pensamiento literario de Javier Marías (The literary thought of Javier Marías) with the observation that “Marías has created his own singular literary thought—a concept he has vigorously reclaimed—that,

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curiously, has been studied relatively little until now.”50 Since then, Marías’s literary thought has been mobilized to examine everything in his novels from Shakespearean references to docufictional ekphrasis. (The same cannot be said of his father’s version of the concept.)51 With literary thought, “Marías attributes to the act of writing a special epistemological entailment,” one scholar writes.52 “Such thought patterns,” claims another, “enable Marías to produce fiction that is driven by the exploration of ambiguity in human motive, speech, and behaviour.”53 These and other scholarly accounts are indeed interesting and valuable on their own terms. But none has much to do with Marías’s own thin, ambiguous, and inapplicable definition of literary thought.54 In fact, the significant limitations of Marías’s concept suggest that its purpose may not have been descriptive at all. “Writing this type of article,” Marías told Ingendaay, referring to his opinion column for El País, “I can voice my opinion as a citizen, talk about present problems, and sometimes I am found to be controversial. All of this is left out when I am writing a novel, which is the way it should be.”55 For Marías, the difference between literary and opinion writing was absolute. The concept of literary thought reinforced the wall that separated them. Yet some readers, according to Marías, appear to have neglected this separation. “One thing that many critics and novelists appear to have abandoned,” he once complained, “is literary thought, forgetting that it is one of the most illuminating, freest, and essential forms of thought.”56 “Each era,” he then implored, “needs to apply this kind of thought to itself.”57 “A writer will almost always know more than his critics,” he finally impugned. “It may sound pretentious, but it’s the truth.”58 What exactly writers know, however, remained mysterious. That literary thought features (or even demands) logical contradictions says precious little about its relationship to fiction. What it doesn’t rule out, though, is an overlap with nonfiction. At the time Marías was developing his concept, his writing was undergoing two important shifts. One involved literary style. Beginning in the late 1980s, Marías’s work drifted from what might be called a selfcontained form of high postmodernism found in novels such as El



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hombre sentimental (The Man of Feeling, 1986) toward the kind of psychological realism found in Tu rostro mañana. As postmodernism was swapped for psychology, Marías’s novels began incorporating Spanish history explicitly, if sometimes indirectly, into their narratives. The centrality of history to Spain’s public sphere made the reflections on history in these later novels tantamount to political commentary. If one shift took place between the covers of novels, the other shift occurred within the pages of the press. Marías’s rethinking of literary genre took place alongside his rethinking of his own public persona, which expanded from the realm of literature to a broad slate of interests that included everything from political horse-trading to Real Madrid’s weekend soccer match. He tested out these interests across hundreds of op-eds and sparked some of Spain’s most heated public debates. Yet these extraliterary interests, according to scholarly and critical consensus, appear to have had little impact on Marías’s novels. If his column writing is studied at all, it is largely seen as an offshoot of his literary writing, not as a possible catalyst for its transformation. In recent years, cracks in the consensus have emerged. Scholars and critics have begun to notice the extent to which the political preoccupations of Marías the columnist have influenced the literary interests of Marías the novelist.59 “The contagion of the cantankerous columnist, which is frequently Javier Marías himself in his columns,” the critic Jordi Gracia observed in a review of Tu rostro mañana, “even reaches the narrator and in so doing gives the novel a strange (though minor) weakness.”60 Tu rostro mañana was not the only novel by Marías to exhibit signs of this contagion. Subsequent novels such as Así empieza lo malo and Tomás Nevinson embraced a columnist’s spirit by involving themselves in the muck of current affairs. The first of these, Así empieza lo malo, was published in 2014, as scholarly criticisms of the country’s transition to democracy had gone mainstream following the 2011 indignados protests. The novel challenged some of those criticisms head-on, taking readers back to the uncertain world of the early 1980s when divorce was still illegal and the country was mired in political turmoil. In a similar fashion, Marías’s final novel,

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Tomás Nevinson (2021), questioned the moral certainty with which many understood the election of far-right leaders across the globe, asking readers to consider the thorny moral issue of extrajudicial killings. These novels reveal the dilemma at the heart of Marías’s literary thought: any effort to realize the novel’s literary potential is undermined by the author’s undeniable relation to the story. As the scholar Marta Pérez-Carbonell notes, “While it would be naïve to mistake the narrators’ opinions or characterisations for the author’s, it is also undeniable that the unmistakable voice of Marías’s narrators coincides with [Marías’s voice as an op-ed writer].”61 As a reader, this can be distracting. How can one continue to suspend one’s disbelief when the novel itself regularly invokes the author’s real-life persona? How can one remain absorbed in a novel that constantly bares its nonfictional devices? As a critic, how should one treat a work of art that flaunts its authorship so explicitly? What is to be done with the blurry convergence between the narrator’s opinions and those of its author? For a writer who wished to steer readers away from seeing links between fiction and opinion writing, Marías perhaps did more than any other to try the patience of his readers. Given all these complications, the question remains: Why would Marías use fiction as a vehicle for opinion journalism at all? Two benefits for Marías appear to outweigh the rest. The first is that novels, as opposed to op-eds, have the potential for a much longer shelf-life. The scholar Sebastiaan Faber has observed that Marías saw how “the selfsufficient nature of fiction also works as a preserving agent. If a fictional text incorporates an element from the real world, that piece of reality will be preserved much better in the fictional environment than if it were part of a non-fictional text.”62 Why this happens has much to do with the disposition with which readers approach fiction. Readers often assume fiction is meant to be enduring rather than timely. This attitude can rub off on how readers approach the elements of nonfiction that exist within the fictional text, potentially extending the expiration date of an otherwise short-lived political intervention.



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If fiction’s capacity as a preserving agent is the first benefit, the way it enables authors to disavow political arguments is the second. Marías disavows the political claims that appear in his fiction by pointing to “literary thought.” Rather than respond directly to critics and interviewers, Marías references his understanding of literary thought, which in turn does the work of rejecting any responsibility he might have over the political ideas that appear in his novels. Whatever political ideas do appear, he has said, are bound to be contradicted by others in the same novel. This means that whatever political coherence one might find in his novels is presumably belied by the contradictory nature of literary thought. No matter how much we try to make sense of Marías’s literary work, it will “look arbitrary and capricious, and also ridiculous,” he warns us, for “it can contain one vision and its opposite, opinions and counter-opinions, and even claims that are not entirely understandable or analyzable.”63 Literary thought thus becomes a powerful defense, a scapegoat, an apotropaic ritual against any political investigation into his or any other writer’s oeuvre.

The Most Naive Op-Ed On June 26, 1999, Marías opened an op-ed in El País titled “El artículo más iluso” (The most naive article) by pleading a peculiar kind of ignorance: “This may be perhaps one of the most naive articles one could write in this day and age.” He then diagnosed a worrying “trend”: Spanish society, he argued, rarely punished liars.64 It was one thing for a politician to lie and not be punished at the polls, Marías noted. It was another for other public figures to lie, especially intellectuals whose esteem partly came from their moral vision. These lies, he argued, were far more insidious. The specific lies Marías had in mind involved how intellectuals represented their own past. Prominent figures in Spain’s intellectual class, Marías claimed, had not been honest about their time during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent Francoist dictatorship. The collaborationist history of Spain’s reputed left-wing intellectuals, in particular,

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had been ignored for too long, and Marías used his platform at El País to set the record straight. To argue his case, he turned to three anonymous examples: “a venerable philosopher,” “a prestigious columnist,” and “a highly-awarded novelist.” Although he did not name the intellectuals explicitly, readers were easily able to identify them: the philosopher José Luis López-Aranguren, the columnist Eduardo Haro Tecglen, and the novelist Camilo José Cela. Each intellectual had obscured important information about their past associations with the Franco regime and had spent the first several decades of the post-Franco period ignoring or covering them up. The venerable philosopher, Aranguren, was guilty of three kinds of collaboration: spying, personal enrichment, and glorifying the regime. According to Marías, Aranguren, who had died just a few years earlier in 1996, had publicly admitted to having spied on his colleagues. Yet because “he told it as a little joke” at an academic conference in 1993, observers in the audience and in the media minimized its importance. Aranguren had also, Marías explained, been the delegate of a regional branch of Tabacalera, the company that controlled the Spanish state’s tobacco monopoly. Marías also found that, in a 1945 book, Aranguren had praised Franco’s “triumphant rebellion” for having set straight the “plebeian revelry” of Spain’s democratic years during the 1930s. Next came the columnist Tecglen. Right-wing commentators, Marías noted, had recently uncovered an article from 1944 in which Tecglen glorified Franco and the founder of Spanish fascism, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of Miguel Primo de Rivera, Spain’s military dictator from 1923 to 1930. What most offended Marías, however, was Tecglen’s defense of the article, which he claimed was rather “light given the circumstances.” Not exactly the strong repudiation one might expect from a man claiming to be of the left. Finally, Marías turned to Cela. Cela had been a censor for the Franco regime in the 1940s, proffering the following justification for his stint: “I became a censor in order to eat, to have a minimal salary.” Yet the dates didn’t add up: Cela had become a censor before Franco had come to power. To make his case, Marías cited a letter Cela wrote in 1938 voluntarily offering his services as a censor to the



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Franco army. Years later, in the 1950s, Cela was commissioned by Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez to write a novel whitewashing the dictator’s legacy. None of these jobs was obligatory, wrote Marías, and Cela had never come clean about them, let alone asked for forgiveness. Aranguren, Tecglen, and Cela had not only obscured their pasts but, when confronted about them, had tried to pass them off as attempts to avoid state persecution. In that way, their actions could be seen as sui generis, understandable in context, and ultimately not morally objectionable. “No one can know for sure how we would have behaved in those circumstances. Perhaps we would have committed more vile acts, who knows,” Marías wrote. Yet “the bad thing for the philosopher, the columnist, and the novelist is . . . that there were and are others who, under the same circumstances, did not do what they did.” The three intellectuals in question were not just avoiding responsibility for significant personal decisions. They were also telling an easily disproven lie that, according to Marías, insulted the memory of all those who, out of principle, chose not to collaborate with the regime. For Marías, the lie was personal. It erased the memory of people like his father. Just over a week later, El País published its first letters to the editor responding to Marías’s column. Two in particular stood out. One was by the philosopher’s son, Eduardo López-Aranguren, written on behalf of the Aranguren family; the other came from the philosopher Javier Muguerza, who had worked under Aranguren during the 1960s. The letters identified the “venerable philosopher” by name and proceeded to respond to what they described as Marías’s “very grave accusations.” Both challenged the idea that Aranguren could have spied on his academic colleagues at all. The years, they said, didn’t line up. Aranguren had only obtained the professorship at the University of Madrid in 1955 and, as is well known, had a tense relationship with the Francoist establishment until he was expelled from the professorship in 1965. Moreover, his statements at the academic conference were paraphrased: no transcript had been published and no recording was available. Who knows what Aranguren actually said, and in what context? The family also

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challenged a second claim from Marías: the insinuation that Aranguren was given the position as delegate of the state tobacco company as recompense for having been a spy. In reality, they said, the position had been in the Aranguren family since before the Spanish Civil War, and Aranguren himself only held one-fourth of it, meaning, “it was an inherited piece that generated a modest income for our father.”65 Marías, they wrote, was completely out of line, and his numerous errors “demonstrated his ignorance and incompetence as a journalist.”66 Marías swiftly returned serve. He admitted to having misremembered the “little joke,” in which Aranguren had “claimed that during the Civil War he was required to collaborate with the Franco regime.”67 Marías had thought Aranguren’s work for Francoists had occurred after, as opposed to when it actually did, during the Civil War. Yet, “if these kinds of ‘reports’ had grave consequences during the postwar period,” Marías writes, “during the war, those consequences often turned out to be fatal.”68 In other words, the error appeared to strengthen rather than debilitate Marías’s argument. The same was true, Marías claimed, of the apparent “error” he had made about Aranguren’s position in the tobacco company. “Do they not realize what they’re saying?” he writes. “In those days, many were expropriated by the Franco government, their property was taken from them.” That the government allowed the Aranguren family to keep its representative position within the state tobacco company “shows just how approvingly the Francoist regime saw them at the time.”69 By the time the family and Muguerza had issued a second response, the debate had shed all its layers. Marías ran up against the persuasive limits of his textual sources. The articles he had cited relied on summary rather than direct quotes from Aranguren. The headlines, likely written by editors, attempted to add newsworthiness to a subject—a scholarly conference—that may not have been terribly newsworthy at all. Other evidence he pointed to was neither surprising nor new. Although Marías persuasively argued that Aranguren had benefited financially from his family’s preferential treatment during the Franco regime, Aranguren himself had admitted as much when emphasizing,



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over the course of his own life, that he had come from a right-wing family. The implication of favoritism was clear. Only one piece of evidence, Aranguren’s 1945 book in which he praised Franco’s “triumphant rebellion,” was new and revealed a past sentiment Aranguren had wanted to hide. Yet even these quotes could be explained away. In the 1930s and 1940s, Aranguren began drifting away from his family’s conservatism and toward the liberal framework with which he came to be associated in the 1960s. Thus, according to Muguerza, these words revealed more a shift in ideology than any sentiment Aranguren still harbored. Ultimately, the problem with Marías’s argument was that it depended on a series of facts that didn’t clearly point to any one truth. Yet Marías’s accusations appeared to have an effect. The debate over the initial article raged in the press for several months. Among the intellectuals who weighed in were Soledad Puértolas, Santos Juliá, and Francisco Umbral, eminent figures in the fields of literature, history, and journalism, respectively.70 Some feared Marías’s article contributed to an incipient right-wing drive to publicize the unsavory histories of leftwing figures, which included the unearthing of the pro-Francoist article by Tecglen as well as attempts to demystify the past of Madrid’s former left-wing mayor Enrique Tierno Galván.71 Others, however, took it as inspiration for further research. Several years after Marías’s article, the historian Pere Ysàs uncovered further documents on Cela, showing that, as late as the 1960s, he had been paid by information minister Manuel Fraga to spy on intellectuals operating as covert members of the Spanish Communist Party.72 Gustavo Guerrero, a scholar and editor of Spanish and Latin American literature for the French publishing house Gallimard, wrote an entire book about La catira (The blonde, 1955), the Cela novel commissioned by Venezuela’s dictator.73 Still others took the debate surrounding Marías’s claims as inspiration for their art. In his 2004 novel, El vano ayer (The futile yesterday), Isaac Rosa reproduced the 1938 letter in which Cela offered his services to the Francoist censors. “From Camilo José Cela,” he writes in a bibliographical appendage, “we have plagiarized a letter from 1938 that is little-known by his readers.”74 Two years later, the writer Benjamín Prado published Mala gente que

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camina (Bad people who walk, 2006), a novel that railed against the impunity of intellectuals during Francoism, among them the writers from the so-called Generation of ’36: Dionisio Ridruejo, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, and Luis Rosales.75 Marías’s piece on Aranguren, Tecglen, and Cela was perhaps the most influential op-ed he would ever write. But it was not his first to address the collaborationist histories of left-wing intellectuals. In 1988, Marías published an op-ed in El País titled “Nada importa” (Nothing matters), an exasperated attempt to explain why Spain’s younger generation of writers looked askance at their literary elders. Though many of the younger generation felt asphyxiated by a literary scene determined to explain Spain’s national ills by way of social realism, Marías turned to a different explanation. “While it is true that the ideology and political acts of an author should not be taken into account when judging the quality of their writing or careers as writers,” Marías wrote, “while that writer is alive and active, while they remain a—notable—part of the society for which they write and which they influence, that writer also exists—like it or not—as a moral figure, even today.”76 Many of these literary elders, Marías claimed, had utterly failed to meet their own responsibility as intellectuals. As with the piece on Aranguren, this earlier article by Marías also ran through a series of examples of anonymous writers and intellectuals who had voluntarily worked on behalf of fascism. He recalled a supposed left-wing philosopher (Aranguren, of course) celebrating “those heroic days” of the “triumphant rebellion.” He mentioned a writer who recently claimed that, during the Civil War, he would have fought for the Republic “for ethical reasons” when, in fact, he chose to fight with the fascists. And he wrote of other characters: a supposedly persecuted writer who, it turned out, had edited the national grade school textbook during the Franco years; numerous supposed leftists and Basque nationalists who cut their political teeth in the fascist Sindicato Español Universitario; and at least five writers who worked for the Francoist propaganda office in Burgos during the Civil War. Though he did not name any names, these cases, he noted, involved some of Spain’s most



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esteemed writers. Several of the allusions, such as the one to Aranguren, would come to light years later. Yet many would remain the stuff of rumor. “How can anyone be surprised that my generation, knowledgeable about these stories and facts, has had little or no appreciation for so many of the figures it was perhaps our turn to admire?” Perhaps, he wrote, it was because “many of our elders were never ours.”77 By 1999, the year Marías published his op-ed on Aranguren, suspicions abounded regarding the Falangist histories of acclaimed intellectuals.78 The article immediately hit a nerve among Marías’s generation of novelist intellectuals, helping unleash and legitimize an inquisitive and suspicious energy that had been building for decades. Writing in La Vanguardia, the journalist Gregorio Morán perhaps summarized the entire saga best in his two-part column about the scandal over Marías’s article: “‘Abuelo, ¿tú fuiste un nazi bueno?’” (Grandpa, were you a good Nazi?).79

Newsworthy Fiction The 1999 op-ed would not be the last time Marías would call out Spain’s intellectuals for concealing their collaboration with the dictatorship. Just a few years later, Marías would do so again in the very different context of Tu rostro mañana, his novel of epic scale, published in three volumes between 2002 and 2007. Widely recognized today as Marías’s magnum opus, the novel was seen at the time as perhaps the most ambitious project of the author’s career, clocking in at nearly 1,600 pages in total. Yet the novel is rarely, if ever, read as an extension of Marías’s opinion writing on Spanish intellectuals. Despite obvious allusions to an ongoing public controversy, Tu rostro mañana is assumed to walk the rarefied corridors of literary history, not trudge through the mud of current affairs. Indeed, the novel has most often been considered part of the aesthetic wave of Spain’s historical memory movement.80 And for good reason. In the fall of 2000, just two years before the first volume of the novel was published and a year after the controversy over Marías’s

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column, Spain’s historical memory movement began to take shape. Major events that defined historical memory’s ascent, including the publication of an article by Emilio Silva that catalyzed the movement, the first exhumation of a mass grave of Francoist victims, and the founding of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, all occurred in quick succession.81 Over the next couple of years, films such as the Catalan documentary Els nens perduts del franquisme (The lost children of Francoism, 2002) by Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis as well as novels such as Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salaminas (2001) began to provide a narrative complement to the movement’s activist origins. Marías’s novel seemed cut from the same cloth: its first part, titled “Fever,” involves a former academic staying up all night perusing a former colleague’s bookshelf in search of titles on Andreu Nin, the revolutionary Catalan leader whose party, the POUM, became the subject of such works as George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom. Yet the novel is in many ways epiphenomenal to the historical memory movement it is supposed to represent. Its questions and concerns seemingly have more to do with the place of retaliation in individual ethics than with revealing what of the historical past has been silenced. The novel itself is centered around the character of Jaime Deza. Deza isn’t new to Marías readers: the last time they encountered him— as the protagonist of Marías’s 1989 international breakout novel Todas las almas—he was finishing a two-year stint teaching Spanish literature at Oxford, after which he planned to return to his fiancée, Luisa, in Spain. At the beginning of Tu rostro mañana, all these plans have come to pass: Deza has married Luisa and they have had two children, though the couple has agreed to separate. Following the separation, Deza relocates to London and now works as a translator for the BBC. In one of the first scenes of the novel, Deza meets a man named Bertram Tupra at a dinner party at the house of friend and retired Oxford professor Sir Peter Wheeler. Following the party, Tupra, who had been surreptitiously evaluating Deza, offers him a job doing intelligence work



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for an agency loosely related to MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI. Deza takes the job and is tasked with examining people of interest to the agency—sometimes through interpretation, oftentimes through recorded or live interviews he listens to surreptitiously. Part of Deza’s work involves predicting what these people might do in the future. In fact, one of the first people he examines is a man who appears to want to persuade British officials to fund an overthrow of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Days later, when the plot is uncovered and makes the headlines, Deza’s negative evaluation of the man’s trustworthiness is confirmed. As Deza assumes more and more assignments, he begins to see how the sausage is made. Violence, he realizes, is everywhere in intelligence work: from the agency’s archives of recordings to be used as future blackmail to Tupra’s own unhinged intimidation of a Spanish embassy employee at a London nightclub. Deza reaches a breaking point upon discovering that one of his reports has been used to justify hiring someone to carry out a murder. Shortly thereafter, he decides to quit his job and return to Spain—mostly to see his children but also to begin to repair his relationship with Luisa. In the last major plot point of the novel, Deza decides to take matters into his own hands after discovering that Luisa’s boyfriend has abused her. He stalks him, breaks into his apartment, and briefly holds the boyfriend hostage, breaking his hand with an iron rod in what becomes a successful attempt to scare him off for good. But his violent retribution has flung open the door of moral chaos. Deza thought he had left behind the violent world of the secret service, but in this final scene, we see the violence has never left him. Part of what made Marías’s novel ambitious was that it was his first that counted the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime among its central themes. While his novels from the 1980s and 1990s by and large ignored debates in print and on the airwaves—whether about Spain’s membership in NATO, state terrorism against ETA, or endless political corruption scandals—since the publication of the first volume of Tu rostro mañana in 2002, Marías’s novels have consistently partaken in them.82 None of these debates, however, irritated or fascinated Marías

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more than the one over the collaborationist past of Spain’s intellectuals. “It has been known for writers who have won the Nobel Prize,” Jaime Deza, the protagonist, muses in the first volume, “to spend what remains of their life thinking all the time: ‘I’m a Nobel laureate, I am, I won the Nobel Prize and, my, how I shone in Stockholm,’ and sometimes even saying this out loud.”83 Self-absorption is what, for Marías, leads intellectuals of the stature of Cela and Aranguren to veil their past. “Most of us,” Deza says, “are masters in the art of dressing up, or softening, our own biographies.”84 But few of us, he implies, will go to the lengths Cela, Aranguren, and others went to revise their personal history. In the second volume of the novel, Deza listens to his father, Juan, a lightly fictionalized version of Marías’s own father, Julián, talk about “a notorious Falangist writer who later ceased to be a Falangist, as most of them did, and, can you believe it, during Franco’s latter years, never mind after his death, the man had the gall to pretend he was a veteran of the Left.”85 It was one thing to stop being a Francoist toward the end of Franco’s reign; it was another to also claim to have been on the right side of history all along. Intellectuals, for Marías, were the ultimate masters of revisionist history. They saw their own life as a play and themselves as the protagonists, often retrospectively plotting a story arc that might appease a desired audience. As Deza explains, intellectuals “watch their life as if they were at the theatre,” and thinking about oneself as an actor makes going off script much easier.86 When intellectuals lie about their past, according to Deza, they are acting on a desire to complete a narrative, to fill in the gaps in one’s persona, and, ultimately, to perform the role of an intellectual in society. A figure such as Cela or Aranguren, who plays that role at the highest level, “sees himself as a story whose ending he must look after, but whose development he must not neglect either.”87 Because of this attention to endings, intellectuals, Deza notes, are prone to revising their past as they reinvent their present, polishing, overwriting, and even erasing that which might seem unseemly to the ethos of the day: “And thus,” he concludes, “we reach a domain in which what matters least is whether things do or do not exist, because they can



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always be talked about, just as all dreams . . . everything can be cancelled, reversed, cured.”88 In the novel, then, how did society respond to intellectuals rewriting their pasts? “The people ate it up,” Deza’s father tells him. “They weren’t ignorant people either, but journalists and politicians. And so, with Spain’s characteristic ethical superficiality, he [Cela] was always celebrated, under both flags.”89 That ethical superficiality, for Deza, stemmed from the Franco government’s total control of society. Practically everyone, the idea goes, had collaborated with the regime in one way or another. Outing collaborationists would thus almost certainly invite similar accusations against oneself, since very few had any moral ground to stand on. Knowledge of others’ misdeeds led to silence, and the ensuing collective silence allowed practically anyone to rewrite their own past. The dictatorship’s longevity perpetuated this culture of mythmaking. “Lies are lies, but lies all have their moment to be believed,” says Deza’s father, who experienced lies throughout his life from various kinds of people.90 As he explains, Many people who were responsible for barbarous acts and crimes against humanity have lived like that quite happily for many years; here, and in Germany, in Italy, in France, all of a sudden no one had been a Nazi or a Fascist or a collaborationist, everyone had convinced themselves they hadn’t been, and would even justify it to themselves by saying: “No, my situation was different,” that’s often the key phrase. Or: “It was a different time back then, those who didn’t live through it can’t understand it.” It is rarely difficult to save yourself from your own conscience if that is what you really want or need to do, still less if that conscience is a shared one, if it’s part of a large, collective or even mass conscience, which makes it easier to tell oneself: “I wasn’t the only one, I wasn’t a monster, I was just like everyone else, I wasn’t unusual; it was a matter of survival and almost everyone did the same thing.”91

Deza’s father shares a number of important characteristics with the real-life Julián Marías. Deza’s father, like Marías’s father, served on the Republican side against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Both subsequently endured prison time as a result of false accusations of treason made against them by a close friend. Both were prohibited from teaching

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in Spain. Neither ever swore a loyalty oath to the Franco regime, and neither had ever publicly outed their false accusers. Unlike so many who had quietly or openly benefited from the regime, both fathers, in fiction and in nonfiction, could claim the ultimate moral high ground. Marías claimed the ultimate moral high ground for both of them. Tu rostro mañana features a scene that, perhaps as explicitly as any in all of Spanish literature, uses fiction to settle scores in real life. As Deza is perusing the library of Wheeler, the retired Oxford professor, he stumbles on several articles written by his father, which rekindle memories of his father’s betrayal by his best friend and his two co-conspirators, a professor and a fellow student. He names all three men: Carlos Alonso del Real (the best friend), Julio Martínez Santa-Olalla (the professor), and Darío Fernández Flórez (the fellow student).92 These three men, it turns out, were real, not fictional. They were the same men who, in 1939, had falsely accused Marías’s father of writing for Pravda. Their names first became public neither in a newspaper, nor in a documentary, television tertulia, or radio show, but rather, some six decades later, in the pages of Marías’s novel Tu rostro mañana.93 Throughout his life, Marías’s father had wanted to forget these men, especially his former close friend. When given the opportunity—such as the moment in his memoir, published in 1988, when he recounts a sympathetic military judge reading out the accusation against him— Marías’s father avoided naming any of his accusers.94 At the same time, he made his knowledge of the parties involved very clear. The same is true of Deza and his father’s accusers. Despite having a profound effect on the life of one man, their actions were par for the course at the time: “So goes the world,” Deza says before quoting his father: “‘Talk, betray, denounce. Keep quiet about it afterwards and save yourself.’”95 Whether in fiction or nonfiction, the protagonists of these stories shared the same general stance toward their wrongdoers. “I won’t be the one to tell the story,” Deza’s father says, referring to outing the Nobel laureate who had whitewashed his Francoist past, “nor will it come out because I was foolish enough to tell you, no, it won’t come out through me or my carelessness.”96 What Marías does in this passage is put the reader in a



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double bind. Any of his readers who had been following the press just a couple of years earlier would have known exactly who the unnamed Nobel laureate was. They also would have known what the unsayable “it” was referring to. Yet these same readers would have not yet known who the three false accusers of Marías’s father were. They also would not have known that at least one of these accusers exemplified the kind of duplicity Marías had long railed against as an opinion writer. Similar to Aranguren, one of the false accusers “allowed himself to boast about being a ‘semi-leftist’ to his rebellious students of the 1970s.”97 What first appears to be a contradictory mess of literary thought—how can Deza’s father say he wouldn’t be the one to leak the names of his accusers when Deza himself names these accusers in the book we are reading?— becomes less contradictory in light of Marías’s opinion writing. Reading Marías either as a novelist or as an opinion writer alone only reveals half the story. What seems clear is that neither Deza, the protagonist, nor Marías, the author, view themselves as the saints they believe their fathers to have been. In the novel, Deza’s stroll along the moral high ground ends abruptly when he decides to sequester his ex’s boyfriend and break his hand with an iron rod. For Marías, the same happens when he uses the novel to out his father’s accusers, seemingly against his own father’s wishes. Unlike the fathers, who used words to convince others of the truth, whether through storytelling or philosophy, the sons, Deza and Marías, resort to action. And action, according to both fathers, isn’t terribly persuasive. As Deza’s father tells us in the novel, in a reversal of the famous maxim, “Words are more unambiguous than actions.”98 Tu rostro mañana makes a particular argument about persuasion. Persuasion, like politics, is not a game of purity. It involves deception, lies, violence, and other unseemly strategies. Persuasion can even involve contradiction. People often convince others of their views despite argumentative inconsistencies, flaws, and holes. Persuasion involves more than just logical reasoning. It also incorporates rhetorical skill and hinges on the conditions in which an argument is made. The novel itself reflects on the fictional conditions in which Deza makes his own

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persuasive arguments about the subjects he examines while working for the secret service. Despite their documentary scaffolding, Deza’s reports are ultimately fictional texts. His reports don’t so much describe their subjects’ past as anticipate what they might do in the future. Yet fiction, the novel shows, cannot be self-contained. Later in the novel, when Deza learns that his narratives about certain people have led to a murder, he discovers the real-world consequences of his own fiction writing. Though far less dramatic and violent, Marías himself might have expected—or wanted, or hoped—that real-world consequences would result from his own revelations in Tu rostro mañana. Perhaps this is at least one reason why the novel exists at all: to render Marías’s political arguments from the opinion pages into the form of a novel. Tu rostro mañana exhibits many classical features of what I have described as the op-ed novel. It makes arguments about a range of topics, from historiography (“We always view the past with a feeling of proud superiority”) to moral judgment (“Benefit of the doubt . . . has ended up paralyzing us, making us, formally speaking, impartial”).99 It clearly intends to intervene in the debates of its time, whether concerning the erosion of social mores or the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War. Yet perhaps Tu rostro mañana is an op-ed novel most of all in its genesis. Published after the months-long controversy over his El País op-ed, the novel finds Marías doubling down on his claims against collaborationist intellectuals and introducing new ones regarding his own father’s persecution following the Civil War. Converting the op-ed into a novel might therefore help preserve its arguments in the amber of novelization. Yet the novel also provided Marías the safeguard of fiction. No one could confidently assume what the author’s relationship was to the ideas between its covers—or whether he had any relation to them at all.

The Paradox of Persuasion If Marías’s opinion writing appears to be dominated by certainty, his literary oeuvre is said to be governed by paradox.100 Not just one paradox



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but many. The paradox of how to understand a novel of action in which time appears to stand still.101 The paradox of how fiction is able to represent reality more accurately than nonfiction.102 The paradox of how to understand characters who often do exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.103 Even “the tragic paradox of human existence.”104 Critics who have cited these paradoxes share the view that we ought to think about his novels in terms of ends, not means. They see paradox as the result of thoughts, decisions, actions, and circumstances, not the processes by which these things happen. Thinking of paradox as the end point of the novel’s story and not as the medium through which it unfolds is an important distinction. It suggests that Marías’s novels are much less interested in how events occur than in uncovering the fact that they occurred in the first place. This helps explain the abundance in Marías’s novels of detective-like settings, characters, and plots, which set the stage for revealing hidden truths rather than discovering why they had been hidden in the first place. But is paradox helpful for understanding the novels themselves? I remain unpersuaded. Reading for paradox often places action and reflection on equal footing. Yet Marías’s novels famously do not value the two equally. His novels are chock-full of reflection, with novel-length passages regularly capturing but several minutes in time.105 In Tu rostro mañana, one episode in a nightclub bathroom involving a Landsknecht sword and torture over a toilet bowl goes on for no less than 155 pages.106 In real time, the same scene would have lasted, at most, five minutes. Paradox ultimately overvalues the role of action, giving disproportionate weight to the novel’s accoutrements—suspense, mystery, and detective-like features. Focusing on reflection instead treats Marías’s novels primarily for their substance, not their signals. Paradox and certainty are, after all, cut from the same cloth: one involves certainty about being certain, the other, certainty about being uncertain. The two terms exist on a continuum. Yet trying to locate Marías’s literary writing at any point along this continuum seems fruitless, and meaningless. This impasse is what results from continuing to view Marías’s literary world as hemmed off from his nonfictional one.

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Some scholars have argued that considering Marías’s novels alongside his excursions into “thinly-veiled” commentary on current affairs is “too referential and reductive a reading.”107 Yet doing this simultaneous reading is what allows us to see that his literary writing is operating in a different realm: not that of paradox but rather that of persuasion. With this in mind, Marías’s own focus on paradox in literary thought becomes less an explanatory theory of literature than a license to test out new ideas on his audience. In his novels and op-eds, Marías tried different political arguments to see which might stick with his readers (or with him). And the ones he returned to most often, both in fiction and nonfiction, were those about Francoist collaboration among celebrated intellectuals. From El siglo in the 1980s to Así empieza lo malo in the 2010s, this theme endured throughout his entire career as a novelist intellectual. Yet there were certain arguments that Marías couldn’t countenance. The most significant of these had to do with his father, Julián’s, efforts to minimize, if not whitewash, the Franco regime’s literary censorship program. In 1949, Julián published the Diccionario de literatura española, which he coedited with the writer Germán Bleiberg. The reference work sought to reestablish the canon of Spanish literature from the medieval period to the present day. Shortly after its publication, however, the dictionary came under fire for deliberately omitting the writings of exiled Spanish writers, regardless of whether their work had been published before or after the Civil War. Rather than accept the criticism, Marías’s father doubled down, defending the decision by arguing that, for some of these writers, “what is primary, decisive, and most important is politics,” not literature itself.108 The focus on politics presumably reduced the quality of literary writing by exiled writers, therefore justifying their exclusion from the Diccionario. With these words, however, Marías’s father gave credence not only to the idea that the writing of exiled writers had been politicized but also to the belief that politicized writing was necessarily of inferior aesthetic quality. This meant that the issue of inclusion ultimately stemmed from the voluntary choices of exiled writers, not from their political persecution, further relativizing



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the oppressive conditions of Spain under Franco. “The situation of pressure, coercion, or contrainte is a general one, even if it is exercised in very different ways,” Marías’s father wrote in a 1953 essay for the literary magazine Ínsula. “The intellectual has almost always lived surrounded by resistance, needing to overcome it and, what is more, counting on it.”109 The fallout from the book would dog Marías’s father for the rest of his life. As the scholar Fernando Larraz writes, “Marías became the spokesperson for one of the Regime’s most often repeated claims, that of having managed to eliminate political excess from the behavior of Spaniards, the same political excess that, in the years of the [Second] Republic, had made the Civil War inevitable.”110 Marías’s comments whitewashing Francoist censorship appeared across genres—literary magazines, newspapers, even his memoirs—and lasted until the late 1990s.111 He made them in an attempt to recover what he viewed as the cultural effervescence of the early Francoist period (ca. 1939–1959). Yet he came to exemplify the same problem his son, Javier Marías, would uncompromisingly diagnose throughout his career. Despite positioning himself publicly as a liberal thinker, Marías’s father, too, had acted as a voluntary censor on behalf of the Franco regime. Marías’s unwillingness to entertain counterarguments, whether in the case of his father or Aranguren, had been a feature of his column writing for quite some time. During the final decade of his life, this reluctance only appeared to grow. Many of his columns for El País wandered into detached assertions about reality. In column after column, Marías colorfully criticized feminism, environmentalism, and much in between. Each of these columns, in turn, provoked forceful replies in which respondents identified Marías as a “sexist,” a “misogynist,” or, more charitably, as someone who exhibited a “profound lack of knowledge about . . . reality.”112 Meanwhile, others asked whether there was still any point to paying attention to Marías at all.113 Yet Marías’s op-eds commanded public attention. Regardless of topic, they regularly spawned cycles of provocation and reaction on social as well as in print media.114 In fact, one might argue that the success

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of Marías’s columns depended far more on evoking a reaction from readers than on the coherence of their arguments. In fact, these cycles occurred so regularly that it would be difficult to conclude Marías was interested in persuading readers of anything at all. In fact, it seems as though his primary goal was just to leave the door open for future controversy. Interested neither in certainty about being certain nor in the certainty about being uncertain, Marías always seemed to be saving his stones.

Chapter 4

Autofiction and the Uses of History

The year 2011 began roughly for Javier Cercas. Just weeks into the new year, the well-known Spanish writer became embroiled in a heated debate in the pages of El País and El Mundo, Spain’s two most widely read newspapers. The debate, which has come to be known as the Caso Rico, began as a cheeky complaint by the academic Francisco Rico about a new smoking ban. But it quickly devolved into a protracted controversy over the role of truth and fiction in public life.1 The vitriol fired from both sides was such that the public editor of El País felt the need to intervene. Twice. Matching the dramatic rhetoric of its participants, one observer summarized the debate in the language of Athenian democracy: “When all is said and done, perhaps the fundamental question that hovers over the Caso Rico is, Who ought to have a voice at the center of the polis?”2 The Spanish polis had indeed become a cacophony of opinion. The commotion surrounding the Caso Rico was so intense that, by midFebruary, Julia Otero, one of Spain’s most well-known radio hosts, dedicated an entire hour of her program to the controversy, bringing on three panelists to debate “how fiction and information should relate to one another.”3 Spain’s national public radio station, Radio Nacional Española, even asked its listeners to call in and leave their answers to the question, “Where are the limits of fiction?”4 By the end of the month, GQ España had profiled the journalist Arcadi Espada, the main adversary of Cercas in the debate, calling Espada’s retort to Cercas “twisted . . . but a masterpiece. Worthy of Laurence Olivier in Sleuth.”5 For the 119

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performance, they named Espada GQ Man of the Week.6 Meanwhile, other outlets began calling it “the first great newspaper controversy of the year.”7 After just over a month of controversy, Cercas declared he was sick of it all. “I don’t want to speak about this topic anymore,” an audibly frustrated Cercas said in an interview with Cadena SER, one of Spain’s premier radio networks. “I only want to say one thing: I have defended and will continue to defend irony, humor, laughter, which is what defines us as human beings. . . . But whoever confuses irony, humor, or laughter with slander and false accusations is confusing good with evil.”8 At the center of the debate sat Cercas and Espada. That these two writers were the protagonists of the controversy would not have surprised many observers. Cercas and Espada shared a long history of public sparring dating back to the early 2000s.9 In 2002, Espada launched the first missive when he lambasted Cercas’s international best-selling and prize-winning novel Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis, 2001), calling it an irritating and moralizing rhetorical trap. The only reason he had read the book in the first place, Espada explained in his collection Diarios, was because Cercas had labeled it, “with pompous pleonasm, a true story.”10 Cercas issued his retort several years later in the literary magazine Quimera. “To feel ripped-off because Soldados de Salamina isn’t a true story, as the novel’s narrator declares here and there,” he writes, “constitutes a naivete—or, more specifically, a stupidity—only comparable . . . to that of feeling ripped-off by the Quijote.”11 Espada responded by reproducing Cercas’s article with added parenthetical commentary, pointing out its supposed errors and inconsistencies. Cercas then followed up by including an anecdote in his weekly column that made Espada look arrogant and self-involved. Espada subjected that column to even more parenthetical attacks.12 And so the back-and-forth has gone, becoming a fixture in Spain’s public sphere. The conflict between Cercas and Espada has almost always revolved around the same issue: Should writers mix fiction and nonfiction? For Cercas, the short answer is yes, and that’s because he believes that, in



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large measure, they already do. Cercas’s view is that all nonfiction writing adheres to an illusory account of how language represents reality. Nonfiction writing assumes a transparency that doesn’t really exist. It claims to represent reality, yet, according to Cercas, language will necessarily betray those ends as it contorts, adds, changes, or otherwise fails to completely express what it purports to represent. According to Cercas, narrative writing goes one step further by organizing reality in a way that is ultimately arbitrary and selective. But at least narrative writing is honest about the limitations of language. Only by embracing this fact, Cercas tells us, can a deeper truth emerge.13 For Espada, however, fiction and nonfiction should not mix. He rejects Cercas’s constructivist premise, primarily because he differs over what counts as a transparent representation of reality. Espada argues that truth depends on method. The question facing nonfiction writers, then, is not how to represent reality transparently but rather how to develop the necessary judgment with which to distinguish verifiable facts from unverifiable inventions. For Espada, fiction writing, not nonfiction writing, is the genre that isn’t forthcoming about the constraints it imposes on representation or the order it demands from reality. While Cercas sees fiction as liberatory and nonfiction as constraining, Espada thinks the two share a similar purpose: to organize reality in such a way that it becomes intelligible to the human mind. Espada’s thinking belies his background in journalism, which dates back to 1977 when he began writing for various newspapers in Cat­ alonia. In his view, when fiction is mixed with nonfiction, it presents a direct challenge to journalism’s evidentiary standards. Inventing sources, proof, and facts violates the ethics of a profession whose legitimacy hinges on how its practitioners obtain information. It seems clear why Espada, a journalist, might be invested in such a debate. But why would Cercas, a novelist? Fiction writers have ethical standards, too, but these don’t involve journalistic methods of obtaining, evaluating, and presenting information. Their careers don’t depend on whether one is able to corroborate a fact among several independent sources. Yet, for Cercas, who by 2011 had published six novels, such questions about the

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relationship between truth and fiction mattered a great deal: arguably all his novels up to that point mixed truth and fiction, practicing a form of writing we now call “autofiction.” The previous two chapters took a wide view of how writers typically organize their careers to become novelist intellectuals. This chapter and the next will focus on two subgenres of fiction writing that have become prime targets for appropriation by op-ed novelists: autofiction and the novel of ideas. Autofiction, the focus of this chapter, can take many forms. Typically, it describes a novel in which the author, narrator, and protagonist share a name, many biographical features, or, most often, both. Many works classified as autofiction hew close to memoir and other forms of life writing about the self. Cercas’s novels, though still works of autofiction, are very different. In 2001, he exploded onto the global literary scene with his fourth novel, Soldados de Salamina, in which a man named Javier Cercas suddenly becomes obsessed with a curiously forgotten episode of the Spanish Civil War while researching an op-ed about the conflict. Unlike many of autofiction’s torchbearers today—think Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, or Ben Lerner—Cercas’s autofiction deals intimately with history and journalism. His autofictional novels often investigate major historical events and figures, from the Spanish Civil War and the country’s transition to democracy to the lives of the writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas, the fabulist Enric Marco, and the former prime minister Adolfo Suárez. Despite their connection to history, these works are ultimately more closely related to journalism than to historical fiction, presenting a shadow narrative of Cercas’s own journalistic process. We follow Cercas the character as he conducts interviews, uncovers documents, reviews footage, visits sites, and works with various kinds of sources. The result of this journalistic labor appears in the form of excerpts, entire journalistic articles, or even book-length investigations that are reproduced in the novels themselves. Cercas’s peculiar novels were originally read not as autofiction but as metafiction.14 This made perfect sense. Metafiction, after all, had a long history in Spain, with some scholars dating its origins to Don



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Quixote.15 The term broadly describes novels that recognize their own artificiality. For some scholars, the uniqueness of Spanish metafiction lies in its attention to “the process of creating the product.”16 Such a self-reflexive form of writing would continue as a literary trend in Spain well into the current democratic period, and a number of El País novelist intellectuals would take part, including Juan José Millás, Rosa Montero, and Javier Marías.17 Considering metafiction by these novelist intellectuals, the scholar Samuel Amago writes, “the strength of the metafictional novel . . . lies in its ability to preempt and acknowledge the weakness of autobiographical and historical discourses through the process of writing fiction.” On this view, metafictional novels complicate historical writing in at least three ways: they acknowledge “the provisional, ever-changing contemporary notion of ‘reality,’ be it personal, historical, cultural, or social”; they underscore the fact that the narrator “is . . . separated from the historical events by a temporal gap”; and they reinforce the unreliable nature of reality by having the narrator “interpret the subjective accounts authored by other historical actors and narrators.”18 Put differently, while historical and autobiographical writing cling to unattainable notions of what constitutes reality, metafictional writing points out this inconsistency. In so doing, it implicitly calls into question nonfiction writing’s claim on reality. As we saw in the debate with Espada, this is precisely Cercas’s view.19 Although metafiction effectively captures how Cercas thinks about language and reality, the concept struggles to capture how his novels think about the relationship between the narrator, the protagonist, and the author. This is where autofiction comes in. Scholars of autofiction have developed intricate accounts of what it means for the narrator, the protagonist, and the author to share a name. Many of these accounts valorize how autofiction refracts questions of interiority, personal psychology, and theories of subjectivity precisely through this shared author function. Yet Cercas’s historical autofiction seems more invested in intellectual arguments than psychological profiles. Over the course of his career, that investment in argument has only increased. His first work of historical autofiction, Soldados de Salamina, is perhaps the

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novel in which Cercas, the author, shares the least with Cercas, the protagonist: although they both published novels titled El móvil and El inquilino (The Tenant and The Motive, 1989) and an op-ed titled “An Essential Secret” (reproduced verbatim in Soldados), Cercas the author was not a full-time journalist and did not have a girlfriend named Conchi; he was a professor with a wife and two children. By the time readers encounter later works of autofiction, such as El impostor (The Impostor, 2014) or El monarca de las sombras (Lord of All the Dead, 2017), the difference between the protagonist and the author has, so far as readers can tell, been reduced to zero. While we might speculate about the fictional dimensions of the narrator in Cercas’s books, when we take a broader view that considers the novel alongside the novelist intellectual himself, whatever differences exist between the two Javier Cercases diminish in importance. That’s because Cercas, the novelist intellectual, cares most about persuading his readers of his own political and historical views. Since the 1980s, scholars have argued that literary genres that mix fiction and nonfiction do so merely to complicate received wisdom.20 I think this view is misguided, and Cercas’s autofiction is a case in point. Through its embrace of fiction and nonfiction, Cercas’s work pushes a particular version of history, attempting to persuade readers of the correct way of interpreting the world. While many authors use autofiction to explore interiority, subjectivity, or the author function itself, Cercas uses it to convince readers that what they are reading is journalism. In fact, this is precisely the intrigue of many of his novels. Part of the pleasure of reading them is that it seems like one is simply reading a journalist reporting a story. We read Cercas recount, open-book style, the entire investigative endeavor, making it seem as though the readerly experience is unmediated. The autofictional pull of authorial intimacy and possible veracity, combined with the thrill of journalistic discovery, make reading his novels exhilarating. Autofiction is helpful for distilling artifice from reality. This might sound counterintuitive. The form invites readers to imagine that they are reading a diary, memoir, or other mode of life writing in which the



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transcription of real life onto the page is seemingly direct. The artifice of these novels is put to the service of creating the sensation that there is no artifice. That’s the whole point. But autofiction also works the other way around. Just as it points inward toward the artificial aspects of the novel it pretends to erase, it also points outward toward the author it explicitly thematizes. It should thus be no surprise that novelist intellectuals are attracted to autofiction as a tool for political persuasion: the form throws the character of the novelist intellectual into sharp relief. Yet the genre also gives us a chance to evaluate how effective the strategies of the novelist intellectual actually are by laying bare the process behind the intellectual’s actions. The simultaneous movement in autofiction toward artificiality and personal psychology thus compels us to consider Cercas the literary character and Cercas the public intellectual—together, not separately. In order to do so, more than five decades after Roland Barthes published “The Death of the Author,” we need to bring the author back in.

The Autofictional Pact Autofiction is a strange beast of a literary term. It has been used to cover quite a range of works, from reported books of American New Journalism, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), to modernist autobiographical novels, such as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927), to the genre of early twentieth-century Japanese confessional literature known as shishōsetsu (“I-novel” in English).21 Yet, at the same time, autofiction has also been used to describe a specific set of novels that have “a particularly French identity, grounded in a French attachment to conceptualizing the self in psychoanalytic terms of desire and difference and to privileging literature . . . as a site for examining the boundary that separates and joins auto and fiction.”22 Since the late 1970s, when the writer Serge Doubrovsky coined the term on the cover of his novel Fils (Threads/Son, 1977), scholars and writers have debated the merits of broader and narrower definitions of autofiction.23 Yet the debate has

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rarely progressed beyond an attempt to nail down a precise definition for the term. This appears to be the case, at least, in scholarship on autofiction in France, Germany, North America, Spain, and the United Kingdom.24 (Noteworthy exceptions include, for instance, work on the impact of seriality, intermediality, and economics on autofiction.)25 The attention to definition might best be understood as an enduring legacy of the term’s coinage, which occurred in response to the scholar Philippe Lejeune’s own attempt to pin down a definition of autobiography in his 1975 book Le pacte autobiographique (On Autobiography).26 In general, autofiction refers to books in which the protagonist, narrator, and author share a name or at least several biographical details. Such is the case with many of Cercas’s novels. Some of these works of autofiction—namely, his three campus novels, El inquilino, El vientre de la ballena (The belly of the whale, 1997), and La velocidad de la luz (The Speed of Light, 2005)—feature a significant number of autobiographical details.27 Other works of autofiction, such as his novels on Spanish history, also feature autobiographical details yet at the same time trouble the standard symbiosis in the genre between protagonist, narrator, and author. In his breakout novel Soldados de Salamina, a frustrated writer named Javier Cercas narrates his investigation into the failed execution of the fascist ideologue Rafael Sánchez Mazas during the Spanish Civil War. His follow-up on Spanish history, Anatomía de un instante (The Anatomy of a Moment, 2009), which investigates the failed coup d’état in Spain on February 23, 1981, takes a slightly different approach, using an unnamed narrator who, based on the prologue, is clearly identified with Cercas himself. In El impostor, a narrator named Javier, again clearly identified with Cercas, reconstructs the biography of Enric Marco years after his claim of having survived a Nazi concentration camp is revealed to have been fraudulent. Finally, in El monarca de las sombras, the narrator shifts, from chapter to chapter, between a character named Javier Cercas and the third person; the first narrates a journalistic investigation into Cercas’s own family history, and the second narrates the biography of Manuel Mena, Cercas’s great-uncle who was a committed Falangist during the Spanish Civil War and is the



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subject of the investigation. Despite slight differences in narrative style, each of these works comfortably fits within scholarly and critical definitions of autofiction.28 Yet much of the scholarly and critical focus on autofiction has centered on the subject at its center. Subjectivity has been responsible for transforming a literary form that is otherwise sociological into one that is hemmed off from the world. In separating autofiction from the world, critics have relied on a misleading opposition by which autobiography refers to a stable, factual, and first-person account of a life, while autofiction refers to a subject that is messy, evolving, and self-reflexive. Autobiography, after all, is far from a faithful reporting of events, thoughts, and feelings.29 Scholars and critics have also assumed a central tension in the form between fiction and nonfiction, invention and truth. Of autofiction, the scholar Marjorie Worthington has written, “The purposeful elision between the author and the author-character draws attention to the impossibility of fully delineating the difference between fiction and nonfiction.”30 Understandably, a lot of critical attention has been paid to discerning what is true and what is not in autofiction in an attempt to delineate where facts end and fiction begins. Yet, as with the opposition between autofiction and autobiography, this attention to facts and fiction turns both into deceptively stable categories— coherent, unimpeachable, and discernible. It presents the beguiling proposition that, if only we could separate out these two features from a work of autofiction, we would have the key to understanding its meaning. At the other extreme end of the debate, some scholars claim that the nonfictional and fictional aspects of autofiction are inseparable from one another. For them, the key to understanding autofiction is to speculate about how readers themselves read autofiction. As the scholar Siddharth Srikanth writes, while “our orientation to the narrative is informed by paratextual genre cues and conventions of reading practice,” when we read autofiction, “our responses to reading are accordingly recalibrated to accommodate what we recognize as combinations of nonfictive and fictive discourse.”31 “In autofiction,” the scholar Ana

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Casas writes, “given the confluence of contradictory data, what will result is a simultaneous reading that will be, at once, autobiographical and fictional.”32 Ultimately, Worthington herself asserts, “the constantly shifting reading strategies that autofiction requires demonstrate that we have decidedly different expectations for fiction than for nonfiction.”33 It is tempting to think that this is how people read autofiction, that readers can distinguish on the spot which parts of autofictional novels are autobiographical and which are fictional and adjust their expectations accordingly. After all, the central conceit of the form is that it purposefully mixes autobiography and fiction. However, the idea that readers can register the difference between fiction and nonfiction in real time seems rather improbable, to say the least, and almost certainly an inaccurate description of how the vast majority of people read autofictional novels. The differences between fiction and nonfiction are almost never signposted in the texts themselves. In fact, doing so would undermine part of the raison d’être of autofiction, which is to make absorption into the text more seamless by appearing to be unmediated. Paratextual clues, such as the cover of the book, guide readers more than an unmarked text, and their assumptions about what they are reading are not necessarily in flux as they make their way through it. The issues I see in scholarship on autofiction appear to be hangovers from certain forms of poststructuralist thought. We have been conditioned to think, for example, that autobiography has no relationship to truth, only to facts, and that autofiction can help reestablish autobiography’s relationship with truth. This, too, I think, is misleading. Nonfiction and fiction each have a relationship to truth. Wedding ourselves to the idea of a continuum that runs from nonfiction to fiction, however, won’t help us appreciate what each form of writing uniquely says about truth or reality. We unnecessarily buy into a conceit of autofiction if we believe that, “in autofiction, the authorial ‘I’ interferes in the text to explicitly question the possibility of making objective an unambiguous connection between the experiential story and reality.”34 By buying into the conceit, we ignore the broader issues at play in a work of autofiction,



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such as how narrative and factual evidence blend to make nonfictional arguments in literary form. What if we instead considered autofiction a form of fictional opinion writing? Like autofiction, opinion writing deals with reality through truth and facts. Like opinion writing, autofiction can be chock-full of social commentary, political analysis, and theoretical argument.35 Yet, unlike autofiction, opinion writing’s legitimacy does not rest on its ability to access “the real.” Thinking of autofiction as a genre of opinion writing transports this debate from the domain of subjectivity to the realm of argument. It clarifies autofiction’s capacity for persuasion, not just reflection. It helps us move us beyond entrenched debates about subjectivity and fiction, and beyond truisms about nonfiction, mediation, and what counts as a true representation of reality. Unlike the strange dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction, which is where autofiction currently finds itself ensconced, the realm of opinion includes not only facts and truths but also unverifiable opinions, thoughts, and emotions— all of which are marshalled to influence the public.

True Stories During the late 1990s, Arcadi Espada and Javier Cercas shared a collegial, if not friendly, relationship. Based in Barcelona, Espada had arrived at the Catalan edition of El País in late 1991, reporting and writing opinion pieces on topics ranging from journalistic censorship to the politics of sports in Catalonia.36 He soon established himself as a harsh critic of Catalan nationalism, publishing the book Contra Catalunya (Against Catalonia, 1997) as well as a growing number of opinion columns on the topic. In February 1998, Cercas joined the paper at the behest of Agustí Fancelli, the Catalan edition’s opinion and culture editor, writing his first piece on the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.37 That summer, Fancelli launched a section called “La Crónica,” where writers of all stripes could explore topics in a more essayistic fashion than in the typical opinion column. Enrique Vila-Matas, Mercedes Abad, Isabel Olesti, and other Catalan writers and journalists contributed regularly

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to “La Crónica.” Espada wrote his first piece for the new section on Dalí.38 Cercas, several months later, would pen his first on José Saramago.39 “It was in this way,” Cercas explains, “that I began to write these pieces for a newspaper that, to borrow the words of Arcadi Espada (another regular of ‘La Crónica’), was mine well before I ever dreamt of contributing to it.”40 Not long after his debut, Cercas gathered select articles he had published in Fancelli’s “La Crónica” section to be included in a new collection titled Relatos reales (2000). The book lays out the theory of the relato real that would come to define Cercas’s fiction and nonfiction writing over the next two decades. The term, relato real, is perhaps best translated as “true story.” Yet, in Spanish, relato (or “story”) almost exclusively refers to fiction, which gives the term its contradictory quality. The idea behind relato real—that fiction and nonfiction can and should mix—became the through line in Cercas’s confrontation with Espada, from their first public exchanges over Cercas’s novel Soldados de Salamina in 2001 to their fiery debate in 2011 and beyond.41 According to Cercas, a relato real is at its most basic “a story that’s determined to be true . . . [but] written by someone who knows that writing it that way is not within their reach.”42 Or, as Javier Cercas, the character, tells his girlfriend in Soldados de Salamina, it’s “like a novel. . . . Except, instead of being all lies, it’s all true.”43 For Cercas, reality and fiction are joined at the hip. One cannot write fiction, in his view, without relying on some amount of reality, just as one cannot write nonfiction without relying on some amount of fiction. Fiction has at its core the true experiences, thoughts, or emotions of its writer and is thus tethered to a reality that exists outside the space of fiction. The same, he argues, holds true for nonfiction, but in the opposite way. Whereas fiction remains attached to a reality from which it wants to escape, nonfiction remains attached to a medium that makes it “impossible to transcribe reality verbatim without betraying it.”44 That disloyal medium is language itself. Language, Cercas argues, perhaps drawing on the linguistic turn, fails the nonfiction writer’s attempt to capture reality in an unadulterated fashion. Invention of some kind will necessarily be involved in nonfiction writing, despite journalistic or historical protestations to



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the contrary. As Cercas sees it, there is simply no way to escape the fictional trappings of language. “Neither can satisfy its own ambitions,” he concludes. “The fictional story will always have a truthful connection with reality, because it is born from it; the relato real, given that it is composed of words, will inevitably free itself partly from reality.”45 Partly, but never fully. The yin and yang of reality and fiction is what gave Cercas’s essay collection its title. Relatos reales consists entirely of journalistic writing, yet Cercas insists these pieces are (true) short stories. They aspire to what he calls “mestizo literature,” or the kind of journalistic prose that incorporates aspects of the poem, the essay, and the short story.46 Unlike fictional short stories, which attempt to escape from reality while remaining tied to it, relatos reales “limit themselves to reality” even as they unavoidably use the fictionalizing function of language.47 More to the point, “true stories” have a particularly long and celebrated history in Spain. “Any good-faith reader knows that a sizable part of the best Spanish prose of this century has been published in newspapers,” Cercas writes. Spanish Romantic writer Mariano José de Larra is the obvious nineteenth-century example—yet few twentieth-century journalists are well known or anthologized in histories of Spanish literature, Cercas points out, citing the early twentieth-century writers Julio Camba and César González-Ruano as examples. Cercas’s theory of the relato real is rather straightforward. It places invention and reality in a dualistic tango, claiming that as one increases the other decreases and vice versa. In writing, either invention (as in fictional short stories) or reality (as in true stories) can dominate, but neither’s dominance can become absolute. That’s because both are ultimately tethered to the real life writer and the unreality of language. Despite offering a neat theory, Cercas does not say much about the rather obvious imbalance between fiction and nonfiction. He writes that his embrace of the relato real “does not mean ignoring the fundamental difference that separates journalism from fiction.”48 But what is that fundamental difference? Perhaps it is simply that fiction and journalism do not abide by the same standards of invention and reality. While fiction

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can incorporate any amount of invention it wishes, journalism cannot. Even the smallest amount of invention, in the way Cercas understands the term, turns a piece of writing into fiction. Journalists are savvy to Cercas’s claims about language and reality. Many, indeed, stretch language to enliven their reporting and keep readers entertained. But the distinction in journalism between reality and invention involves norms, journalistic norms. It has neither to do with a blurry continuum in which nonfiction and fiction bleed into one another, nor with bright lines that separate one absolutely from the other. So long as a writer adheres to those norms, they stand on solid journalistic ground, and the norms about what constitutes “facts” have held steady since the profession’s midcentury turn toward the social sciences. Even after American New Journalism, a movement during the 1960s and 1970s in which journalists borrowed narrative techniques from fiction, such as plot, character development, and scene setting, these norms still hold across the different parts of the profession today.49 The year following the publication of Relatos reales, Cercas published his first major work of autofiction, the novel Soldados de Salamina. The novel would go on to sell more than a million copies worldwide, be translated into more than twenty languages, and win several literary prizes, including the short-lived Salambó Prize for Narrative and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Anne McLean’s English translation. In 2003, the novel was adapted by David Trueba into a film, which was nominated for eight Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars. More important than any of these accolades, however, is what the novel has come to mean symbolically. Published in 2001, just as the country’s historical memory movement was taking off, the novel was quickly received as a commemoration of the anonymous heroes who had fought for democracy during the Spanish Civil War.50 Upon the publication of the novel, Mario Vargas Llosa expressed elation in his weekly column for El País: “Whoever thought littérature engagée had died should read [Soldiers of Salamis] to find out just how alive it is, just how original and rewarding it is in the hands of a novelist like Javier Cercas.”51 It fit, many thought, hand in glove with the aims of the



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incipient memory movement, whose goals involved recovering the remains of some 114,000 people who were still unaccounted for in over two thousand unopened mass graves across Spain. The novel tells the story of a middle-aged journalist named Javier Cercas who aspires to become a novelist. In 1999, a colleague suggests to Cercas the character that he should write a commemorative article for the sixtieth anniversary of the death of the poet Antonio Machado, who famously perished while fleeing fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. As he prepares the article, Cercas suddenly remembers a littleknown episode that took place around the same time as Machado’s death, creating “a kind of chiasmus of history.”52 During the war, the notorious fascist ideologue Rafael Sánchez Mazas was captured in Barcelona and taken to the town of El Collell to be executed alongside a group of other Francoists. The Republican soldiers fired, but Sánchez Mazas was not hit and, amid the confusion, managed to escape to a nearby forest. After a long search, a Republican soldier finds the prisoner, but rather than report back, the soldier yells, “There’s no one here!” saving Sánchez Mazas from certain death. Sánchez Mazas went on to become a high-ranking minister in Franco’s cabinet and a celebrated fascist ideologue, while the soldier was never heard from again. Cercas the character becomes obsessed with this episode. He researches it thoroughly and writes a narrative nonfiction book about it, which he calls a relato real. The mise en abyme culminates in the second part of the novel, which comprises the nonfiction book that was researched and written in part one. Yet Cercas the character does not feel completely satisfied with the book: what’s missing is the point of view of the anonymous Republican soldier who spared Sánchez Mazas’s life. Cercas’s drive to find the soldier occupies the third part of the novel. Eventually, he comes upon a man named Miralles, who denies being the man in question, but in such a way that leaves readers certain he actually is. In Soldados de Salamina, there are those who wish to heroize Falangist writers and those who wish to dismiss them. The people who heroize them come from all walks of life, but the ones Cercas the character

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focuses his attention on are those who specifically produce books. “In the mid-1980s,” he writes, “certain refined, influential publishers released the occasional volume by some refined, forgotten Falangist, but by the time I became interested in Sánchez Mazas, in some literary circles they weren’t just rehabilitating the good Falangist writers, but also the average and even the bad ones.” By the late 1990s, the literary furor over these new discoveries was so generalized that “it became fashionable . . . for Spanish writers to rehabilitate Falangist writers.”53 For Cercas, this was a sign that editorial standards had spiraled out of control, and both editors and writers alike risked jeopardizing the enterprise altogether. “Some ingenious souls, like some guardians of leftwing orthodoxy, and some ignorant folks,” he writes, “decried that to vindicate a Falangist writer was to vindicate (or to lay the groundwork for vindicating) Falangism itself. The truth is exactly the opposite: to vindicate a Falangist writer is only to vindicate a writer, or to vindicate oneself as a writer vindicating a good writer.”54 For Cercas the character, a purist attitude about politics runs the risk of conflating the literature on the page with the politics in the flesh. For Cercas the author, the collapse of aesthetic standards posed an even greater threat to blurring that distinction. Political positioning is key for Cercas. Not all fascists were bad writers, but neither were they all deserving of recognition for their writing, and failing to grasp the obvious truth to these statements meant something was amiss in Spanish political culture. If critics on either side were issuing judgments according to preset ideological positions— the left shunning the recovery effort, the right embracing it uncritically— the only reasonable path forward was one that split the difference. Cercas the character neither genuflects at the altar of dogmatism nor remains blind to the thorny ethical problems that come with celebrating a fascist writer. Reason, in this equation, amounts to political moderation, turning the politics of left versus right ultimately into a zero-sum game. Yet what we learn over the course of Soldados de Salamina is that ideological commitments don’t actually exist. Cercas’s girlfriend in the



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novel, Conchi, is a case in point. Conchi is a fortune teller for a local TV station who drives a beat-up Volkswagen and enjoys vacations on the beach. The narrator, who fancies himself an intellectual, appears to be somewhat embarrassed about their relationship, though “not so much because I was embarrassed to be seen dating a well-known fortuneteller, as for her rather flashy appearance (bleached blonde hair, leather mini-skirt, tight tops, and spike heels).”55 Conchi identifies as a leftist and doesn’t hide her political views. “How can you want to write about a fascist with the number of really good lefty writers there must be around! García Lorca, for example,” she says upon learning of Cercas’s plan to write about Sánchez Mazas.56 Conchi recognizably embodies the stereotype of a certain leftist in Spain, who is impulsive, idealistic, wears her emotions on her sleeve, doesn’t really read books, only knows the name of one leftist writer, and throws around the word fascist like it’s going out of style. Yet by the second half of the novel, Conchi has changed her tune. Upon hearing Cercas tell the story of the anonymous soldier who saved Sánchez Mazas’s life, she exclaims, “We’re going to come out with a fucking brilliant book!”57 Practically overnight, Conchi stops berating Cercas for writing about a fascist and helps him pursue the story at all costs. In fact, Cercas tells us, “I now think that, if not for her, I would have abandoned the search early on.”58 Conchi’s dramatic shift tells us something about her politics, which is that, despite outward appearances, she never really had any. The novel also identifies similarly empty political commitments on the right. Throughout the middle section of the novel, which contains the relato real, Cercas paints Sánchez Mazas as a man far more committed to literature than to Falangist ideology. His family is “solidly anchored in the cream of Bilbao society” and has ties to the preeminent writer, intellectual, and university rector Miguel de Unamuno.59 The mood music of high society, “where Sánchez Mazas dazzled, as a cultivated, circumspect and rather bombastic conversationalist,” is punctured by the repeated assertion that “it would not be an exaggeration to claim Sánchez Mazas as Spain’s first fascist, and quite correct to say he was its most influential theoretician.”60 Yet this assertion is never

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demonstrated, it is simply made. Quotes from speeches or other texts by Sánchez Mazas to prove the extent of his influence or early adoption of fascism never materialize in Soldados. His influence and ideology must be instead taken at face value. Soon we witness another dramatic shift. Following the end of the Civil War, Sánchez Mazas, we are told, has decided to give up on his political advocacy. “Perhaps Sánchez Mazas was never more than a false Falangist, or else a Falangist who was only one because he felt obliged to be one,” Cercas writes. Perhaps “all Falangists . . . deep down . . . never entirely believ[ed] that their ideology was anything other than a desperate measure in confusing times, an instrument destined to succeed in changing something in order that nothing change.”61 For readers of the novel, this seemingly unprecedented shift isn’t terribly surprising. By then, Cercas had already laid the groundwork for readers to question the depth of Sánchez Mazas’s commitment to fascism, in part by presenting such little evidence of his political activity in action. Despite appearances to the contrary, political ideology, the novel shows us, can seem principled until the moment when, all of a sudden, it is not. The novel’s commentary on political ideology makes it difficult to square with the historical memory movement to which it has been connected. Those who work, volunteer, and agitate on behalf of the historical memory movement had and still have deep ideological commitments. What makes them somewhat distinct is that their ideological commitments are not necessarily partisan, and participants in the historical memory movement typically do not uniformly line up behind a single political party. Yet it would be naive to ignore the fact that many in the movement identify with the left, most especially around issues involving law, memorialization, and cultural politics. These ideological commitments have proven to be deep and long-lasting.62 Their activism over the course of two decades has led to the passage of major historical memory laws in 2007 and 2022, the opening of more than 740 mass graves, the recovery of remains from more than nine thousand people, and the establishment of the largest archive on forced disappearance in Spain.63 None of this activism fits with the argument



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in Soldados de Salamina that deep ideological commitments perhaps don’t exist. Cercas’s case against ideology was only half the battle. The other half concerned history. A week after the release of the novel’s film adaptation, the journalist Gregorio Morán decided to set the record straight about the story told in Soldados de Salamina. In his column for La Vanguardia, the most widely read Spanish-language newspaper in Cat­ alonia, Morán contested the idea that the failed execution of Sánchez Mazas had ever taken place. “This history of his execution,” he wrote, “was made up by him and written down by his buddy Eugenio Montes.” The anonymous Republican soldier’s act of grace, Morán contended, never actually happened. “Sánchez Mazas made up the feat of the execution in Collell,” he said, as part of “his despicable behavior during his detention in Barcelona by Republican intelligence agents.”64 According to Morán, Sánchez Mazas reported on twenty of his Falangist colleagues in Catalonia in exchange for amnesty, which resulted in their trial and execution. For Morán, the point of these assertions was not to defend any one of Franco’s soldiers but rather to reveal the historical Sánchez Mazas to be a man who “acted viciously” and whose “degree of cowardice reached the point of parody.”65 This, he averred, was decidedly not the Sánchez Mazas many readers thought they knew so intimately by reading Soldados de Salamina or watching its filmic adaptation. Morán’s critique wasn’t only historical, however. He argued that the novel failed as a work of literature as well. It failed because it didn’t pass what he called the “verisimilitude” test.66 In other words, for Morán, the novel simply wasn’t believable as a work of fiction. “Rafael Sánchez Mazas,” Morán wrote, “was no literary character, but rather an odious and intelligent man.”67 This undermined Cercas’s fictional depiction of him as an empty vessel with whom readers might in some sense identify. But few if any lay readers would have shared Morán’s standard for verisimilitude. Readers coming to the historical material for the first time would not have been able to judge the accuracy of Cercas’s use of real life historical characters. The works in question are works of fiction, after all. Attempting to hold fictional representation to historical

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standards is a fruitless endeavor, no matter how historical the novel, film, or work of art claims to be. Nonetheless, Cercas took the bait. Rather than point to the fact that fiction does not have to adhere to standards of historical accuracy, he published a reply several days later. “The article by Gregorio Morán,” he wrote, “contains a series of affirmations to which I have the obligation to respond. Mr. Morán claims that the failed execution of Rafael Sánchez Mazas in the shrine at El Collell . . . ‘is a falsification of history.’ It is not, and there is ample evidence to prove it.”68 In the article, Cercas details a significant amount of evidence that supports the veracity of the failed execution story he recounts in the novel. He cites a 1981 memoir by Jesús Pascual titled Yo fui asesinado por los rojos (I was assassinated by the commies), which recounts the event. He refers to “many testimonies from farmers of the area, some of whom are still alive, that confirm that Sánchez Mazas was there during those dates, that they picked him up, fed him, and protected him, and that he told them about his escape.”69 He identifies “a notebook, in the possession of one of the farmers, in which Sánchez Mazas describes part of the unexpected episode.”70 And, to interrogate Morán’s hypothetical, he calls to the stand historians Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté, Joan Villarroya i Font, and Joan Maria Thomàs, whose research, according to Cercas, reveals Sánchez Mazas had nothing to do with the trial and execution of his Falangist colleagues in Catalonia, as Morán charged. “Does he want us to think . . . all those who had seen Sánchez Mazas during those days were lying?”71 Why did Cercas feel the need to defend his novel against accusations of historical inaccuracy? The answer, it appears, lies in his relation to autofiction. For Cercas, autofiction isn’t all about subjectivity. Unlike other practitioners of the form, he uses it to play both sides of the fiction-nonfiction divide. On the nonfiction side, defending against attacks is crucial to accruing legitimacy as a novelist intellectual in the public sphere. In his response to Morán, Cercas underscored the rigor of his research process by way of a rhetorical question: “Had Mr. Morán read the book by Pascual Aguilar, consulted newspapers of the period,



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interviewed the survivors of the episode, known of the existence of Sánchez Mazas’s notebook?”72 Cercas’s autofiction emerges directly from a research process that resembles that of journalists and historians. Thus, when the novel is attacked for fudging the historical record, so, too, is the validity of this research as well as Cercas’s standing to opine on matters of history, politics, and the world of ideas. Whatever differences remain between Cercas the author and Cercas the protagonist, they become immaterial to the political argument the writer wants to advance. Cercas’s autofiction stages a construction of the self, but one that far exceeds the covers of a novel. It involves his entire public persona: radio, television, and newspaper interviews across Spanish and international media; the lecture circuit at universities, book fairs, and arts festivals; and most important of all, articles every Sunday in El País. Waving the flag of fiction amid criticisms of historical fabrication would have been a risky proposition. Doing so might have jeopardized Cercas’s standing as a novelist intellectual.

Author Meets Critics By the time Cercas wrote his second book of historical autofiction, he appeared to have learned his lesson. Published in 2009, Anatomía de un instante has been read as a direct response to the attacks from Espada, Morán, and others.73 Unlike Soldados de Salamina, it embraces nonfiction almost completely, replacing Cercas the character with an unnamed narrator whose biographical details more closely resemble those of the author. In fact, readers who flipped to the back cover would have encountered a rather direct, if perplexing, statement about the book’s aims. “This book is an essay in the form of a story or a story in the form of an essay,” readers are told. “This book is not fictional. . . . This book is the story of [a] gesture and the story of a coup d’état and the story of several decisive years in the history of Spain. This book is unclassifiable. A one-of-a-kind book.”74 Readers familiar with the debates over Soldados de Salamina might have identified the disclaimer as an attempt to assuage earlier complaints about historical accuracy.

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Yet some features of the prior novel remained prominently in place. As with Soldados, Anatomía de un instante opens with journalism, specifically opinion journalism. In Soldados, Cercas is asked by the newspaper he works for to write a “commemorative article” on Antonio Machado, which turns into a piece on the historical coincidence of Machado’s death and Rafael Sánchez Mazas’s escape. In Anatomía, it is an Italian newspaper that asks the narrator, whom we understand to be Cercas, to write an article on his memories of the 1981 coup. In Soldados, Cercas includes his op-ed verbatim, foreshadowing what will become the novel’s mise en abyme structure when, in part two of the book, a sixty-page relato real titled Soldados de Salamina appears in the novel itself. In Anatomía, although we do not see the op-ed, we do receive a summary of its arguments, the initial part of which states, “I wrote an article in which I said three things: the first was that I had been a hero; the second was that I hadn’t been a hero; the third was that no one had been a hero.”75 This journalistic opening is a hallmark of Cercas’s historical autofiction. Early on in El impostor, we encounter Cercas the author’s initial thinking about Enric Marco, the fabulist who is the subject of the novel, in the form of an op-ed published by Cercas himself in El País titled “Yo soy Enric Marco” (“I am Enric Marco”), reproduced verbatim. In El monarca de las sombras, something similar happens: the novel opens with an op-ed by Cercas, also reproduced verbatim, concerning the life of his great-uncle, Manuel Mena, who then becomes the subject of the novel.76 These openings prepare readers for a book that appears less interested in the divide between fiction and nonfiction than in the orthogonal genre of opinion writing, which is nonfictional but most importantly argumentative. Anatomía de un instante centers on a remarkable still image taken by television cameras inside the Spanish parliament on February 23, 1981, at the moment when Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero announces his coup attempt by firing warning shots into the air. While the congressional representatives take cover, three individuals do not: then–prime minister Adolfo Suárez, Spanish communist party leader Santiago Carrillo, and deputy prime minister and military general



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Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado. This image gives the book its structure: significant time is dedicated to the biographies of Suárez, Carrillo, and Gutiérrez Mellado as well as to the coup’s buildup, execution, and fallout. “The central question Anatomía formulates,” Cercas would later write, is “Why did Adolfo Suárez remain seated on February 23rd while bullets from those who had launched the coup whizzed around him in the chamber of the Spanish Congress?” “That question,” he tells us, “is a moral question.”77 In the novel, Cercas responds to this moral question with a slate of arguments. One is that, at the time of the coup in 1981, just over five years after the death of Franco and just over two years following the ratification of the Spanish Constitution, many politicians and elites sought an interim military government. These included those on the far right, who thought a coup might restore order to what they perceived was the social chaos of the early 1980s, as well as those on the left, including members of the socialist and communist parties, who, according to Cercas, advocated for “a surgical coup to straighten the country out.”78

4.1  Spain’s Congress of Deputies on February 23, 1981, during Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero’s coup d’état. Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez (center) remains seated. Televisión Española

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The surgery was meant to excise one person and one person alone: Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, who many thought was the source of Spain’s worsening problems, from rising unemployment to the assassinations by the armed Basque pro-independence group, ETA. Although only those in the military acted, the widespread antidemocratic atmosphere, according to Cercas, was partly to blame for the coup itself. Yet the coup appeared to take everyone by surprise. Another argument of the book is that Spaniards of all stripes had been passive during the coup’s buildup and execution. Cercas indicts the popular revisionist history that waxes poetic about watching the coup unfold on live television, going out into the streets to protest, picking up a special edition of El País or Diario 16, hearing King Juan Carlos I denounce Tejero and his accomplices, and generally participating in the collective expression for democracy and condemnation of the country’s authoritarian past.79 This popular uprising, he asserts, was pure fiction. In reality, “no one had been a hero,” Cercas reminds us. “No one at the university where I studied—not at mine or any other university—made the slightest gesture of opposing the coup; no one in the city where I lived—not mine or any other city—took to the street to confront the rebellious Army officers; except for a handful of people who showed themselves ready to risk their lives to defend democracy, the whole country stayed at home and waited for the coup to fail. Or to triumph.”80 One of the curious features of these arguments by Cercas is their focus on widespread consensus. Both the left and the right, whether among elites or among the people, seem to exhibit few political hangups about arriving at the same conclusions as their ideological counterparts. That’s part of the point. These and other arguments in the book serve the ultimate purpose of dramatically minimizing the role of ideology in Spanish history. The argument Cercas made in Soldados that ideological commitments didn’t actually exist among those who publicly professed them is tweaked only slightly in Anatomía: ideological commitments don’t ultimately determine the actions of individuals, even if they are politicians. With its portraits of purported leftists and far-right ideologues, Soldados showed the flimsiness of even

4.2  Man shows two members of the Guardia Civil the cover of newspaper Diario 16, which reads “The Coup Has Failed,” in the early morning of February 24, 1981, outside Madrid’s Palacio de las Cortes. Photo by Gustavo Catalán Deus. © Gustavo Catalán Deus

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avowed ideological commitments: Cercas’s girlfriend, Conchi, proclaimed to be a leftist when it’s doubtful she ever understood what such a political attachment might have meant, while Sánchez Mazas appeared to be a fascist ideologue yet was merely a “false Falangist” who didn’t—and couldn’t—believe the very ideology he had helped advance. Something similar happens in Anatomía. Cercas traces the ideological transformation of Carrillo, Gutiérrez Mellado, and especially Suárez over the course of their careers and argues that, when faced with the ultimate moment of moral truth—a coup d’état—ideology did not figure into their decision-making. How does Cercas persuade his readers of this paradoxical idea? Like any good op-ed writer, Cercas resorts to a number of argumentative and rhetorical strategies, not simply claims and supporting evidence. These involve everything from counterintuitive assertions to rhetorical questions—all in the service of upending conventional wisdom and waking Spanish society up from its dogmatic slumber. Throughout the novel, readers constantly encounter what might be best described as “double statements,” which appear to collapse perception onto reality. Regarding the relationship between former Francoist minister Manuel Fraga and Adolfo Suárez, Cercas writes, “In the autumn and winter of 1980 that Fraga should be plotting against Suárez (or that Suárez should feel that Fraga was plotting against him) was an almost unavoidable fact, obeying a logic that was not merely political.”81 Notice the trick. Cercas makes a statement before parenthetically revising it midsentence, seemingly repeating the same claim. Yet the repetition differs slightly from the original. The first claim is that Fraga was conspiring against Suárez; the second is that Suárez felt Fraga was conspiring against him. The second version of the claim— “Suárez felt”—shifts from the realm of fact, in which truth claims can be evaluated according to journalistic or other standards, to the realm of perception, in which the truth of feelings is ultimately individual and speculative. Persuasion here occurs through the emotionally compelling combination of fact and fiction, where the elision between the two and the fictional backdrop of the novel lend the double statement



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plausible deniability. After all, the original claim that Fraga was plotting against Suárez appears to be modified by the second. Being able to cross fiction and nonfiction in this way shows both the persuasive power and ethical risk of autofiction. In Cercas’s autofiction, these kinds of double statements feature claims that appear as fact but are nonetheless unverifiable, just as they seemingly disown the statements they make that are verifiable. Much of the book’s autofictional conceit, in fact, rests on the difference between what is affirmed outright and what is qualified in parentheses, asking readers, ultimately, to trust Cercas’s research, while also constructing an escape hatch in case Cercas’s claim comes under scrutiny. Much of Cercas’s argumentative strategy hinges on repetition. Double statements are one way to reinforce a claim while hedging against it just in case it turns out to be wrong. Another is circular logic. Consider how Cercas describes general Gutiérrez Mellado. “General Gutiérrez Mellado was never essentially a politician,” he writes. “He was always a soldier, and therefore, because he was always a soldier, his gesture that evening [to stand up to Tejero] was, above all, a military gesture. . . . Gutiérrez Mellado was the only soldier present in the chamber and, like any other soldier, he carried in his genes the imperative of discipline and thus could not tolerate soldiers’ insubordination.”82 The logic here seems to make sense until one stumbles into its circularity: Gutiérrez Mellado was never really a politician, Cercas tells us, because he was always a soldier; therefore he was never going to act like a politician, because, at the end of the day, he was always a soldier. This once-a-soldier-always-a-soldier tautology fails to actually explain the actions of the deputy prime minister. Instead, it reveals an essentializing view of how people act in times of crisis: their actions, Cercas claims, are completely determined by one facet of their background. The tautology is also reverse engineered: despite Cercas trying to explain Gutiérrez Mellado’s actions through his military background, it is Cercas’s curiosity about Gutiérrez Mellado’s military background that has compelled him to retrofit it to his actions during the coup. But, most important, the tautology smuggles an idea into the text without

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evidence or argument. In this case, Cercas believes Gutiérrez Mellado’s background as a soldier is important, and so the tautology allows him to make that claim without ever having to tell us exactly why. This logic takes its most extreme form when he attempts to explain how Spain’s transition to democracy actually happened. “Only irreconcilable enemies,” he writes, “could reconcile the irreconcilable Spain of Franco.”83 The cleverness of this sentence lies in the fact that we all know what it means, and thus it is spared from having to be logically coherent. We understand what Cercas is pointing to: Spain was such a divided country because of the Civil War that the only way the divide could be mended was for people at the extremes to come together to make amends, which is exactly what Carrillo, Gutiérrez Mellado, and Suárez did. Yet the flashy categorical language used to heighten the drama allows Cercas to avoid having to justify answering the question that logically follows: How could these men be such irreconcilable enemies if, in the end, they all reconciled? Cercas’s mode of argumentation is not always so obvious. At certain moments in Anatomía, he subtly enlists repetition in the performance of historical precision. He does this in myriad ways. Most often, it takes the form of repeating a claim several times, progressively adding more specific qualifications as a means to narrow the scope of the original claim. For example, regarding the king and democracy, he writes, The King’s project was democracy; more precisely: the King’s project was some form of democracy that would allow the monarchy to take root; more precisely still: the King’s project was some form of democracy not because he found Francoism repugnant or because he was impatient to give up the powers he’d inherited from Franco or because he believed in democracy as a universal panacea, but because he believed in the monarchy and because he thought that at that moment a democracy was the only way to root the monarchy in Spain.84

With each new qualification, readers peel back layers of rhetoric until reaching the core claim, which, unlike the original claim, appears qualified, thoughtful, and nuanced. Though many might object to that first claim—“The King’s project was democracy”—few would quibble with the last. Yet statements like these, though specific and



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unobjectionable, rarely come with justifications. Why the Spanish king believed democracy was the only way to preserve the future of the monarchy is asserted rather than argued. The assertion, moreover, depends on readers making rather significant assumptions, such as the idea that democracy in Spain after the death of Franco was inevitable. (Historical evidence strongly suggests it was not.)85 This produces a rather different kind of circularity in which the readerly assumptions Cercas’s claims depend on allow him to bury the writerly assumptions behind those claims altogether. These rhetorical strategies—double statements, circular logic, repetition—help make Cercas’s novel politically persuasive. However, perhaps the most persuasive strategy of all is the novel’s selective use of history. In Cercas’s hands, history charts the volition of individuals, who make decisions, like the one by the king to support democracy, at a remove from social, economic, political, and other pressures. This is not to say that such pressures don’t appear in the novel; they do. They just fade into the background as the reconstruction of certain decisions by major historical actors takes precedent. This leads to a view of history that, at times, appears puzzlingly preordained. The most that is said about ETA’s assassination of Franco-appointed Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973, for instance, is that it was “providential for the country because the disappearance of the Prime Minister who was to have preserved Francoism facilitated the change from dictatorship to democracy.”86 Yet Cercas fails to mention that the stage was already set for Carrero Blanco’s successor, Carlos Arias Navarro—arguably even more of a hardline Francoist than Carrero Blanco—to derail the providential transition from dictatorship to democracy. Cercas’s turn toward the heavens is a way to avoid a material explanation for the downfall of the dictatorship, one that included growing labor militancy, armed Basque separatism, and divisions among the political groups that made up the Francoist alliance. Indeed, this latter explanation is the one favored by the period’s preeminent historians.87 Toward the end of the novel, we read a brief—and telling—aside about a random incident that occurred on Suárez’s watch before he

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became Spain’s prime minister. “On June 15, 1969, while he was still civil governor of Segovia,” Cercas writes, “fifty-eight people died under the rubble of a collapsed restaurant in the residential development of Los Ángeles de San Rafael; the tragedy was the result of the proprietor’s greed, but normally such a scandal would have spattered Suárez politically. . . . Suárez nevertheless managed to emerge strengthened from the catastrophe.”88 Though his description of the event is accurate, Cercas leaves out one key bit of information. The “proprietor” referenced in the passage was a man named Jesús Gil. After the 1969 catastrophe, Gil was imprisoned and then pardoned by Franco. He would go on to become the far-right, populist mayor of the coastal town of Marbella and owner of Atlético de Madrid, the third-largest soccer club in Spain.89 From the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s, Gil dominated the Spanish media, at one point even hosting his own prime-time variety show on one of Spain’s few national television networks. Whatever the reasons behind it, the omission shapes how we read the narrative. Cercas’s audience in Spain would have immediately recognized Gil and formed an alternative view of Suárez or even the authorial intentions of Cercas. They might have lost sympathy for Suárez or pigeonholed him as a far-right politician. Or they might have begun to doubt the premise of Cercas’s individualized account of the 1981 coup d’état. We will never know. As with his first work of historical autofiction, Anatomía de un instante provoked a number of critical responses. One of them came from the journalist Bonifacio de la Cuadra, who on February 25, 2011, published an op-ed in El País questioning a fundamental part of Cercas’s reimagining of the 1981 coup. De la Cuadra, who was part of the founding group of El País back in the mid-1970s, had retired from journalism in 2005, taking up a position as professor of opinion writing in the master’s program in journalism jointly run by the Autonomous University of Madrid and El País. Back in 1981, De la Cuadra had coauthored the first book to investigate the coup attempt, titled Todos al suelo: La conspiración y el golpe (Everyone down: The conspiracy and the coup). De la Cuadra and his coauthors identified twelve civilians and military



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personnel who, in the weeks leading up to the coup, had pseudonymously authored opinion articles agitating for an overthrow of power in the far-right paper El Alcázar. Cercas made a meal of this in Anatomía de un instante, spending dozens of pages describing how the far right leaked plans of the coup on a daily basis, apparently without anyone in the government having noticed. In the novel, he even reprinted the cover page of El Alcázar from the day before the coup, using it as evidence to suggest that people at the paper had known of the plan in advance. The newspaper cover, in fact, helps set up the conspiratorial mood that guides the novel’s reconstruction of the months leading up to the coup. Amid all this, Cercas suggested that some of the authors of Todos al suelo had, years later, retracted their accusations against the civilian and military agitators. The claim was a big one. It implied that the authors made significant mistakes in their original reporting and pointed the finger at hasty journalism for the widespread incomplete understanding of one of the most important episodes in the country’s postwar history. Its journalistic shoddiness, in a sense, gave Cercas the license to reinvestigate the episode, giving the book its raison d’être. In his op-ed, De la Cuadra denied these assertions. There were no retractions, he said. In fact, any retractions would be news to the book’s coauthors. What’s “most bizarre about this affirmation,” he wrote, was its being based on citations that not only failed to support it but, in fact, also seemed to directly contradict it. “These details in Cercas’s book, along with others,” De la Cuadra wrote, listing several other factual slippages, “suggest that perhaps it would have been preferable for the excellent writer to have followed his initial literary instinct of writing a novel.”90 Cercas accepted De la Cuadra’s challenge, publishing a response in El País the following day. He presented evidence for the retraction in the form of a line from one of De la Cuadra’s coauthors, from a later book published nearly two decades after the coup. The line read, “The most amazing thing of all is that 20 years later, the authors [De la Cuadra et al.] would not dare to repeat the accusation that the list that appears in Todos al suelo exhausted, or even comprised, the civil plot of the coup d’êtat.”91 For Cercas, this line was the smoking gun. It read plainly as an

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admission of error: the authors admitted they wouldn’t publish the list of plotters they had published back in 1981. Though it came from only one of the authors, the statement presumed to speak on behalf of all of them. If the authors said their journalistic work no longer met the rigorous factual standards of the profession, one could rightly assume they no longer stood by their previous reporting. Yet Cercas’s reading was perhaps too hasty. Rather than indict the book for faulty reporting, the statement Cercas cited appears to imply that the book, in fact, underestimated the number of people involved in the coup in the first place. The “accusation” referred to whether the published list of conspirators was exhaustive. Admitting that the list was not exhaustive but rather too conservative in its estimate is not an admission of shoddy reporting; rather, it admits that the reporting didn’t go far enough. Several days later, Fernando Jáuregui, the author of the passage in question, cleared things up for readers of El País. “I would like to clarify that, against what Mr. Cercas suggests, I have never distanced myself from what was written in Todos al suelo about the possible civil implications of the coup d’êtat,” Jáuregui wrote. “It is true that in a subsequent book [I said] that the civilian plot was not exhausted by the names we mentioned in Todos al suelo, but that doesn’t mean that those mentioned were adjacent to it. Of course, 20 years after the coup and the publication of our book there have been advances and several hypotheses regarding the existence of no less than three coup attempts.”92 Jáuregui’s clarification sealed the debate, revealing Cercas’s misreading and suggesting the possibility of many more conspirators in the coup attempt. Yet the exchange of op-eds raised a number of questions. Why would Cercas risk making such a claim, especially one that could be so easily countered? Did it really matter for the argument of Anatomía whether “some of those journalists” who had collectively written the book “have since retracted their accusations”?93 Why base that claim on a reading of a single passage in a single book? Shouldn’t such claims, like any good work of journalism or history, be based on multiple sources? How, exactly, did this claim about truth, haste, and journalism shape the story Cercas wanted to tell? The questions just kept coming.



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Ambivalences, contradictions, and other wrinkles in the historical record are what motivate Cercas’s autofiction. They license his decisions to reinvestigate historical episodes, such as the 1981 coup attempt, giving his books not only legitimacy, but also a reason to exist in the first place. With a book on Spanish history already under his belt, Cercas was better positioned than most novelists to conduct the necessary journalistic research to undertake such a project. Yet, as this episode and others like it show, Cercas was not about to let go of journalistic and historical authority once he turned to fiction. In fact, he doubled down on it, suggesting that perhaps he was not satisfied with writing the kind of fiction that claimed to be cordoned off from the world it examined.

Reading for Argument Fiction was at the center of the heated debate between Cercas and Espada in the early months of 2011. Yet this time, rather than struggle over the role of fiction in the first draft of history, Cercas turned his attention to the space where the second, third, and fourth drafts of history thrive—that is, to opinion journalism. Could a writer lie to defend an argument in an op-ed? No seems to be the obvious answer. Arguments in opinion journalism might be based on one’s opinion but should not be based on a lie. Journalistic norms and standards still govern truth claims in opinion journalism. What happens, though, if that lie is really just a joke? Is a joke that seems like a lie permissible in an opinion column? On January 11, 2011, Francisco Rico, one of the most esteemed scholars of Spanish literature, penned an op-ed in El País responding to a law banning smoking in bars and restaurants. Rico, though, was no ordinary scholar of Spanish literature. Since 1997, he had frequently appeared in El País, mostly contributing opinion columns but also literary criticism, essays, and obituaries.94 Beyond the press, he had become something of a literary figure himself, regularly appearing by name in novels by Cercas and Javier Marías.95 Despite a recognizable byline, however, Rico’s celebrity was nowhere near that of the two novelist

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intellectuals. If his name appeared at all in Spain’s prensa rosa, or gossip media, it was because the princesses of Spain’s royal family happened to be reading his latest annotated edition of Don Quixote.96 Rico’s op-ed on the new smoking ban was harshly critical of the law. The law, he wrote, “was a low blow to freedom, an example of stupidity, and a vile act.” As evidence, he submitted a slew of claims. “Not few of the arguments against tobacco,” he noted, “lack scientific rigor and are simply the result of ignorance, because of the current insufficiency of research.” He continued, “Stupidity especially drives the list of spaces where tobacco is banned [because] it is clear that the legislators identified them at random . . . without any concern for order and coherence.” Finally, Rico said, “an inquisitorial spirit dominates the law,” making it chock-full of intolerance, suspicion, guilt, discord, and a “sectarian dimwittedness toward the reality of life and of men.” Rico signed off with a postscript: “In my life I have never smoked a single cigarette.”97 To Rico’s friends, acquaintances, or those who had seen him in public, this last line was clearly in jest. Rico was a compulsive smoker, which was the very reason he wrote the piece against the law in the first place. Yet to the readership of El País, the statement, which appeared in an opinion, not a humor, section, came to be read as a blatant lie. Rico’s claim to have never smoked a single cigarette was an attempt to shore up the legitimacy of his argument by other means. It was one thing for a smoker to criticize an antismoking law; it was very different—and more legitimate—for a nonsmoker to do so. Rico’s statement played on this very difference, as well as on his audience’s ignorance. The postscript set off a firestorm of controversy. Immediately, Milagros Pérez Oliva, the paper’s public editor, began receiving irate reader responses, which she shared in her own column several days later.98 Rico’s “status or not as a smoker would be merely anecdotal had he himself not clearly used it [in the op-ed] as a resource to give his position more legitimacy,” one reader wrote. Another quoted by Pérez Oliva wanted for someone to “resolve the doubts about the final argument [Rico] uses to persuade readers of the vileness of the law.” Was that argument ultimately legitimate? they asked. What became clear from



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these and other responses was that the joke, if it existed, had been lost on many readers. What caught their attention instead was the falseness of a claim that seemed integral to persuading readers of the argument. For Rico, whose response was included in the public editor’s followup column, these readings were misguided. “Nearly everyone who has taken a stand against my article has done so by rummaging through my life and my habits,” he writes. “My arguments barely get a hearing.” For him, the column was an experiment. How many readers would take the bait? How many would resort to ad hominem attacks, and how many would actually wrestle with the arguments he presented? Most, in his view, took the bait. Yet Rico’s experimental conditions were less than ideal. His position in the column was less an argument than a series of provocative yet unsubstantiated claims. Rico mentioned no studies, engaged with no scholarly conclusions, and provided no evidence for his claims about tobacco research, legislative decision-making, or “sectarian dimwittedness.” This despite Rico being a scholar himself. If he wasn’t interested in taking his own argument seriously, how could he expect readers to? No matter. Weeks later, Cercas would voluntarily take to the witness stand to defend Rico. In his own column for El País, provocatively titled “Rico, to the Firing Wall,” Cercas defended Rico’s freedom to lie in an opinion column.99 “The best place to besiege the factual truth of the present is in the newspaper,” Cercas wrote. “Does that mean that everything in a newspaper must answer to the truth of facts? In my view, no.” While in most parts of the newspaper “what ought to prevail is factual truth,” he wrote that in some sections, “such as newspaper columns and op-eds, certain licenses are admissible.” Cercas pointed to humor as what licenses newspaper columnists to not strictly adhere to facts. Rico, in his view, was just making a joke, so why didn’t we let him make his joke? Like Rico’s, Cercas’s argument, too, runs into trouble. It fails to recognize that jokes are less about intention than reception: for a joke to be a joke, the audience must recognize it as such. Jokes are social creatures. That many readers pointed out that Rico had lied is overwhelming evidence that the joke, at least for his audience at El País, had failed.

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Perhaps, however, Rico had other intentions. Indeed, considered within the context of his public intellectual persona, the op-ed appeared to be yet another attempt to poke fun at the paper’s progressive-minded readership.100 Espada shared this interest in poking fun at the readership of his former paper. A couple of days after Cercas’s column ran, Espada announced to readers of his own column, published by the rival paper El Mundo, that Cercas had been detained for his involvement in a recently uncovered sex trafficking ring.101 Just like Rico’s comment about having never smoked, this, too, was a lie. Neither had Cercas been caught up in sex trafficking, unintentionally or otherwise, nor had he been arrested. Those following the debate, and perhaps even those who were not, would have quickly recognized Espada’s piece as a work of satire. The column traded on hyperbole and drew attention to extratextual references—his history of clashes with Cercas—that would have been known among a broad swath of the readership. Unlike Rico’s joke, Espada’s satire wasn’t contained in a throwaway line at the end; rather, the column was satirical from start to finish. Yet the fallout from the debate was as predictable as it was swift. Many condemned Espada for having crossed a line, and papers called the column “fake news,” saying that Espada had “resorted to sexual defamation to denigrate Cercas.”102 Cercas’s friends and colleagues, including filmmaker David Trueba and editor Lluís Bassets, took to the opinion pages to voice their shock and frustration over the incident. At one point, Cercas reportedly considered filing a libel suit against Espada.103 Even years after the controversy had died down, the debate continued to compel journalists, academics, and writers to position themselves on one side or the other.104 For Espada, the issue was clear: Cercas was making a category mistake. Years earlier, responding to Soldados de Salamina in his memoir Diarios, Espada had provoked Cercas in much the same way, calling the narrator of the novel “a somewhat idiotic individual named Cercas.”105 The provocation was an attempt to call Cercas’s bluff. Was Cercas really merely the author of the novel, as he maintained, or was he also its



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narrator, as Espada suspected? Cercas had often gone back and forth on the question of how his works of autofiction ought to be read. At one moment, he said that his autofiction was “only a novel”; at another, that it “dispenses with fiction” and “everything adheres to [and] is stitched to reality.”106 Sometimes these reversals happened in the same piece about the same work.107 Yet almost every time a journalist or historian attempted to point out inaccuracies in his autofiction, Cercas aired his frustrations publicly. Espada, the target of some of Cercas’s frustrations, ended his participation in the debate over the Rico op-ed by pointing out a tension in how Cercas thought about fiction and nonfiction. “That Ana Karenina jumped in front of a train is neither a lie nor a truth,” he wrote. “That Javier Cercas was in a brothel, in Arganzuela, on Sunday morning is a lie.”108 Fiction, in other words, could not be reported, fact-checked, or treated as true information. Only when fiction moved into the realm of nonfiction could it be held to different argumentative standards. This debate returns us again to the dilemma of the novelist intellectual. How are we to deal with a figure whose work appears to simultaneously occupy the realms of fiction and nonfiction? The debate over the Rico op-ed gives us some idea of how the existence of such a figure might affect the public sphere. Novelist intellectuals indeed represent a problem because the public sphere purports to be a nonfictional arena in which claims and arguments can be evaluated according to journalistic standards. These standards, however, might neuter the unique contribution novelist intellectuals can bring to public debate—namely, their access to certain forms of truth through fiction that remain inaccessible to nonfiction. What draws the ire of Cercas’s critics, such as Espada, is that they think fiction writers are having their cake and eating it, too. In his historical autofiction, Cercas subjects true events to the logic of fiction without ever renouncing their factual connection to reality. These critics see Cercas wanting to intervene in a public debate over history, historical memory, and Spanish politics without the responsibility of sharing a common set of evidentiary and argumentative

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standards. Yet without these shared standards, no honest debate can take place. In some ways, Cercas’s critics miss the forest for the trees. Arguably his most important contribution to autofiction is to combine it with history and journalism. Historical autofiction, in Cercas’s hands, offers an engrossing account of how journalists and historians make the intellectual and documentary connections that lead them to develop the powerful narratives that shape our understanding of the past. We see this on full display in a novel like Soldados de Salamina. Yet part of the trouble with Cercas’s historical autofiction is that it perhaps does not take its own historical framing seriously enough. Rather than fully defamiliarize a historical moment readers think they know all too well, Cercas’s books often end up shifting gears and attempting to defamiliarize politics by pointing out the unexpected ways in which opposing political persuasions converge. As we have seen throughout this chapter, these attempts often lead Cercas to make exaggerated claims, such as the one that people don’t actually hold deep political convictions. But the fact that people have political ideologies that one might consider incoherent does not mean that their convictions don’t run deep. Contradiction is part of politics. In the end, Cercas’s historical autofiction tries to reveal the strangeness of political thought without recognizing the complex psychological and emotional relationship people have to their own ideas. While other kinds of autofiction entice readers with the true thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a possibly real person, Cercas’s autofiction simply sticks to true thoughts. It draws readers in and makes its meaning by searching for these thoughts across history and the political spectrum. This shift from autofiction’s traditional domain of interiority to a new domain of argument means we don’t need to be exceedingly cautious about distinguishing Javier Cercas the author from Javier Cercas the narrator. One can read for political arguments in a way that nevertheless avoids the pitfalls of biographical reading. Unlike reading for the truth of identity, interiority, or subjectivity, reading for the truth of political argument is unaffected, if not enhanced, by



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autofiction’s blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction. In his own critical review of Soldados de Salamina, the writer Félix de Azúa gave Cercas perhaps the best piece of advice on persuasive writing: “The preciseness of difference is more interesting than the impressionism of similarity.”109 Reality, it turns out, might not be all that it is alleged to be.

Chapter 5

The New Novel of Ideas

Just months before the global financial crisis hit in 2008, Almudena Grandes received a promotion. In addition to her weekly column in El País’s Sunday magazine, Grandes would now write a weekly opinion column for the op-ed page in the daily paper. Despite the extra work, the opportunity, she reasoned, was too good to pass up. Grandes began writing for the Sunday magazine in 1998, arriving as part of a cluster of literary writers that included Antonio Tabucchi (best known for Sostiene Pereira [Pereira Maintains], itself arguably an op-ed novel), Luis Sepúlveda, and recent Cervantes Prize–winner Guillermo Cabrera Infante.1 The magazine’s hiring spree nearly doubled its number of columnists. As if these new voices weren’t enough, several months later the magazine would bring in Elvira Lindo and Manuel Rivas, two of the most recognizable novelist intellectuals in Spain.2 Grandes was part of a wave of new changes at El País Semanal. The Sunday magazine had been founded in 1976 as “a luxury boutique . . . far from politics and current affairs, in a narrow sense.” Beginning in the 1990s, it shifted gears in an attempt to shed the label of a glossy women’s magazine.3 Editors began soliciting opinion journalism on all matters of public affairs. But staffing changes came much more slowly. Upon being hired, Grandes would become only the third female columnist in the history of the Sunday magazine.4 An additional constraint of writing for the Sunday magazine, she would later explain, was that columns were due fifteen to twenty days before publication (while a column for the op-ed page could be submitted mere hours before the paper went to 158



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press).5 Given these conditions, participating in the ongoing debates in the Spanish public sphere proved challenging, if not almost impossible. When Grandes arrived at the paper’s daily op-ed page a decade later, the time constraint went away but another one still remained. The dismal gender disparity she witnessed at the Sunday magazine also afflicted the op-ed page. Until the late aughts, very few female bylines appeared on the op-ed page; fewer still had a regular column.6 In fact, the number of women who wrote a regular op-ed column during the paper’s first quarter century reached only three: Rosa Montero, Maruja Torres, and future editor in chief Soledad Gallego-Díaz. All were renowned reporters who had decided to test their mettle in opinion well into their careers: Montero launched her first opinion column in 1978, Torres in 1986, and Gallego-Díaz in 1993, writing as the ombudsperson.7 By 2001, the number of columnists who were women had only increased to five.8 At the time, this dismal gender disparity was not unique to El País. A study of the country’s seven major national newspapers found that, in 2000–2001, only 21 of the 199 regular columnists, or 10.5 percent, were women.9 These regular female columnists, moreover, only contributed a mere 6 percent of the total output by regular columnists.10 While thirty-four men published more than ninety columns a year (nearly two columns a week), among female columnists only Carmen Rigalt reached this plateau with her column for El Mundo. Occasional female op-ed writers didn’t fare much better: only 13 percent of all op-eds were written by women. But one finding in particular stood out. “It is noteworthy,” the study said “that the three Madrid newspapers (ABC, El Mundo, and El País) were those that had the lowest representation of female op-ed writers in their pages.”11 Grandes wasted no time in establishing herself on the El País op-ed page. Appearing on January 7, 2008, the day after Three Kings Day, Grandes’s inaugural column took direct aim at the political power of the Catholic Church, criticizing the “almighty gasping of a Catholic hierarchy keen on short-lived power and not very willing to suffer along this veil of tears.”12 The following week, she shifted her attention to women’s rights, chastising the Socialist-led government and the conservative

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opposition for essentially forcing women in Spain to go to private clinics to have abortions that were nominally covered by the state. “Hopefully all private clinics close their doors forever someday,” she wrote. But since Spain’s “rule of law does not guarantee the exercise of certain rights by all citizens,” and since private companies “function as an escape valve that exonerates public authorities from the responsibility of ensuring equal and universal [abortion] services,” we should at least, she argued, show these private clinics some respect.13 Over the next few months, Grandes’s column would cover a range of topics within and beyond Spain. She took the Swiss People’s Party and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to task for pushing openly xenophobic immigration policies, she criticized how the Western media covered the Russo-Georgian War, and she analyzed the political strategy of bipartisan photo ops among Spanish politicians.14 Although Grandes’s earlier columns for the Sunday magazine had regularly discussed politics and current affairs, her column for the op-ed page appeared to mark a sea change in her opinion writing. From that moment onward, whether in fiction or nonfiction, Grandes no longer apologized for explicitly including her political opinions in her work. This was an important shift, especially in her fiction writing. While Grandes’s novels had always been political in some respect, she had rarely used them to foreground her politics. Her first novel, Las edades de Lulú (The Ages of Lulu, 1989), unsparingly critiqued Spanish society and art through an erotically charged narrative that would have an immediate effect on the way sex was represented in Spanish literature. Her explicit narration of the sexual life of a fifteen-year-old challenged the politics behind available literary representations of gender, sexuality, and adolescence in Spain, which tended toward either repressed symbolism and metaphor or a pale imitation of French eroticism from the Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille. Her subsequent novels, from Te llamaré Viernes (I will call you Friday, 1991) to Castillos de carton (Cardboard castles, 2004), took on broader themes of gender and identity by commenting, for instance, on the countercultural years of la movida madrileña in the 1980s, but her literature nonetheless remained



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boxed into the category of women’s literature. As she said on more than one occasion, “I don’t like the term ‘women’s literature’ because the term ‘men’s literature’ doesn’t exist. Speaking specifically about ‘women’s literature’ turns the literature written by women into a kind of separate subgenre, and that is unjust.”15 Women’s writing may have been political, but the category, according to Grandes, did more to constrain than emancipate the artworks it described. Grandes’s early column writing, too, felt confined. Before 2008, her opinion columns contained many opinions but relatively few about politics. In fact, much of her early opinion journalism can be straightforwardly read as fiction. Such is the case with the columns collected in her 2003 book, Mercado de Barceló (Barceló market). Despite cutting across genres of literary and opinion writing, these columns nonetheless made their arguments through a fictionalized narrative.16 Opinion columns written in prose fiction are not unusual in Spain. Since Mariano José de Larra’s early nineteenth-century cuadros de costumbres, writers have regularly issued their social critique in the press through column-length short stories based on real-world reporting. Such columns, often called “literary” or “personal” columns, turn seemingly impressionistic descriptions of daily life into searing critiques of the latest cultural fad, attempting to persuade readers to challenge consensus opinion. This was Grandes’s modus operandi. Her hobby horses ranged from the gospel of economic prosperity—captured by the phrase “Spain is the eighth economic power of the world,” commonly heard in the early aughts—to the political philosophy of Francis Fukuyama.17 Following the publication of Mercado de Barceló, the political commentary of Grandes’s columns began to shed its metaphorical husk. In 2004, she relaunched her column for El País’s Sunday magazine under the headline “Escalera interior” (Interior staircase).18 In its new incarnation, Grandes’s column replaced allegory with metaphor and used the daily struggles of working-class people to reframe ongoing debates in Spain, which had been dominated by elites. Her first column is a case in point.19 Titled “Braulio’s Sister,” the piece posed the question of why, following the Atocha train station bombing in March

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2004, polls had shifted so dramatically from predicting a conservative landslide to giving Spain’s social-democratic party its largest general election victory in nearly twenty years.20 How, the column asked by way of a dialogue between two fictional characters, could Spain be the country of both enthusiastic participation in the invasion of Iraq as well as dyed-in-the-wool antiwar activists? The question was, of course, impossible to answer. Yet Grandes, whose left-wing politics placed her outside of Spain’s typical center-left-center-right dichotomy, was well qualified to pose it. Some might have made excuses for any one of the three parties involved—the social-democratic Socialist Party, the conservative Popular Party, or even Spanish voters themselves. Grandes instead sought to question the essential stability of Spanish politics itself. This seeming lack of political constraint is part of what made Grandes a divisive writer. Despite her successful career and status as one of the most important novelists of her generation, her polemical style ruffled feathers even among her own cohort, some of whom criticized her writing for being too partisan, too Manichean, and, ultimately, too political. This chapter asks what it is about Grandes’s writing that made it so polarizing. One dimension we will consider is her twentyfirst-century revival of the novel of ideas, which she retrofitted with techniques borrowed from the realm of opinion journalism. In keeping with their nineteenth-century forebearers, Grandes’s novels of ideas often disregarded one of the foundational mantras of postwar realism, “show, don’t tell.”21 These novels told rather than showed, forecasting political positions through a narrator, dialogue, or summary so that her readers knew, in advance, on which side of the aisle each character sat. In opinion writing, she did something similar, asserting her political positions as true rather than using typical modes of persuasion through claims and arguments. As such, her writing often came across as simply engaging in polemics for its own sake. While this form of opinion writing gained her many enemies, it also won her many supporters, who appreciated her ability to speak her mind and not show deference toward her political adversaries.



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The Partisan For Almudena Grandes, announcing one’s writerly inspiration was tantamount to declaring sympathy for a political party. Her columns often became the battleground for a war of position. More often than not, her sympathies were for her contemporaries. For writers who had recently passed, such as Juan Eduardo Zúñiga, Marcos Ana, or Gabriel García Márquez, she wrote personal, reverential obituaries.22 For fellow novelist intellectuals who had recently published novels, such as Marta Sanz or Jesús Carrasco, she used her column as a megaphone to stir the sympathies of readers.23 She even used her column as a cold shoulder, reserved for the select few who had betrayed party loyalty, such as Mario Vargas Llosa.24 Yet, since her promotion to the op-ed page in 2008, Grandes regularly declared her partisanship for one writer above the rest: the nineteenth-century novelist Benito Pérez Galdós. Galdós is Spain’s most famous novelist since Cervantes. An eminent practitioner of Realism, his novels are often compared to those of Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy for how they epitomized the late nineteenth-century literary concern with social issues. Across some seventy-seven novels published between 1867 and 1920, Galdós narrated the social, economic, and political upheaval modernity had wrought on Spain. His series of historical and contemporary novels, such as Doña Perfecta (1876), Fortuna y Jacinta (1886–1887), or Tristana (1892), illustrated how changes to everything from railway technology to paper money shaped social relations—and social strife—between a bourgeoisie in Spain that sought to emulate its aristocratic precursors and a working class tempted by the promises of urban opportunity and upward mobility as well as those of the Catholic Church.25 As Fredric Jameson has written, “If Zola is the Wagner of nineteenth-century Realism . . . then Benito Pérez Galdós is its Shakespeare.”26 On January 4, 2020, Grandes dedicated her El País column to the centenary of Galdós’s death. In the past, she had sung the praises of his ability to depict the double standards of the upper classes and how they controlled their lower-class servants, all the while avoiding cheap

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moralizing and melodrama, even when taking on thorny moral issues, such as an affair between two people at opposite ends of the social hierarchy.27 This time, for Galdós’s centenary, Grandes asserted his continued relevance in times of social tumult. The previous decade had seen an endless tide of social and economic despair: the 2008 financial crisis, the Catalan crisis, the rise of the far right. Amid such class strife, Grandes thought literary Realism might be a salve. “Galdós was never neutral,” she wrote, “and in his early writings he encourages a fresh democratic hope.”28 This hope, Grandes argued, emerged from the study of history. “Readers of Galdós have a broader perspective on what we’re living through,” she claimed, pointing to the author’s historical novels and their explanations of how Catalan nationalism was suppressed in the nineteenth century, how the right wing had historically managed to position its extremist politics as moderate, and how global liberalism traced its roots to Spain’s short-lived but radical Constitution of Cádiz in 1812. Yet this understanding of history, she wrote, also explained why, “in the end, the desolation” of Galdós was “nearly absolute”: history, after all, demonstrated why the Spanish bourgeoisie failed to become the motor of social transformation, the working class remained splintered, and the Catholic Church had been able to preserve its social, economic, and political hegemony.29 Grandes could not have expected what was to come. Her seemingly innocuous column on Galdós sparked a heated exchange among some of Spain’s most recognizable public intellectuals over what, if anything, novelists should do with their political views. The debate, which had begun on the El País op-ed page, quickly spread across the literaryintellectual landscape as writers began staking out positions with reckless abandon.30 For Javier Cercas, Grandes’s praise for Galdós typified contemporary literature’s wayward drift. “The Spanish novel,” he wrote in his own column, “is living through the return of a didactic, moralistic, and inspirational form of realism.” This form of writing, he reasoned, “I don’t think will get us very far.”31 Though he didn’t name any names, the culprit was clear. It was not Galdós, or any one novelist, who was at fault for having laid the tracks of moralism in literature. Rather, it was an



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entire genre that had done so: the nineteenth-century novel of ideas. Attracted to the desire to make literature socially useful, young writers in the twenty-first century, Cercas argued, had flocked to the novel of ideas for the first time in more than a century. Yet, for him, the genre had significant downsides. It often resulted in literary works that were low on plot, character development, and emotional depth— in a nutshell, aesthetic quality. These literary features, Cercas argued, had been exchanged for Manicheanism, dogmatism, and idealism, reproducing the worst tendencies of left-of-center politics: selfsatisfaction, self-importance, and self-confidence. “I don’t believe in that postmodern banality that says literature is not ‘useful,’” Cercas explained. “Of course it is,” he wrote, “but only as long as it doesn’t pretend to be so: as soon as it pretends [to be useful], it becomes propaganda or pedagogy, and stops being literature.”32 That Galdós was never politically neutral, as Grandes had written, was, for Cercas, precisely the problem. “In his novels he almost always takes sides,” Cercas claimed. “Concerned with spreading the causes he believed in (all very laudable, by the way), he tells the reader what he or she should think, instead of leaving the thinking up to the reader. In literary terms, such paternalism is lethal.”33 Though Cercas was speaking about Galdós’s oeuvre in general, literary critics have typically framed these criticisms around a select number of novels. Published between 1875 and 1880, these works are collectively known as Galdós’s novelas de tesis—Doña Perfecta (1876), Gloria (1876–1877), Marianela (1878), La familia de León Roch (1878–1879).34 Galdós’s novelas de tesis, scholars have argued, “not only wished to make clear [a] critical vision” of society, especially by revealing the double standards of the upper classes, “but also to persuade readers . . . and to win over their support.”35 For Cercas, however, these tendencies of the novela de tesis had infected Galdós’s entire oeuvre. In that judgment, he was not alone. Some scholars have criticized Galdós for having internalized the use of literature as a vehicle for political propaganda.36 Rather than enlisting literature in political causes, Cercas would have preferred the opposite approach—crucially, one that was also more journalistic. It is “that

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objectivity, that impartiality—that neutrality,” he wrote, that “constitutes one of the pillars of the modern novel: for its most distinguished representatives, it guarantees the creation of an autonomous linguistic world, which springs from reality but is emancipated from it.”37 In other words, without what Cercas called “neutrality,” literature’s relationship with the real world would always be one of dependency. Grandes was perplexed. To speak of neutrality in literature was, for her, to make a category mistake. “Objectivity is a chimera,” she responded. “To take sides has to do with writing itself. As the literary theorist György Lukács said, a novel can have politics or not, but it can never be without ideology. To take sides is to explicitly recognize the [ideological] commitment of writing itself.”38 Antonio Muñoz Molina, similarly nonplussed, took to his own El País column to defend Galdós and his politically sophisticated novels, highlighting how they depicted liberal colonels and conservative captains in a refreshing way, outside of the expected left-of-center worldview.39 In his own intervention in the debate, Vargas Llosa did not equivocate, declaring himself on the side of Muñoz Molina and, despite their political differences, Grandes.40 Galdós’s “merit,” Vargas Llosa argued, “is . . . in how he did it: with objectivity and an empathetic and generous spirit, without ideological parti pris, attempting to distinguish between what is tolerable and intolerable, fanaticism and idealism, generosity and maliciousness in the very heart of [would-be] adversaries.”41 Objectivity is precisely the literary virtue many believed Grandes didn’t have. An avowedly public figure from the early 1990s onward, Grandes regularly associated herself with left-wing causes even before her novels became more actively interested in current affairs. During her first two decades in the public eye, she signed an array of manifestos, including ones against the Spanish conservative party’s fiscal strangulation of the Federico García Lorca Museum and the party’s decision to send troops to fight in the Iraq War.42 Alongside Belén Gopegui, she was, for decades, one of the most prominent writers to support Izquierda Unida, the political coalition that is home to the Spanish Communist Party.43 Compared with her outspoken public persona, however,



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the political impact of her novels regularly came up short. As the scholar Akiko Tsuchiya writes, summarizing many criticisms of Grandes’s early fiction, “If these novels present a critical vision of reality at all, it becomes lost amidst accounts of banal sentimental crises and family traumas of self-absorbed female characters, whose capacity for selfanalysis is limited to what they might have learned from pop psychology books.”44 Between the winters of 2007 and 2008, things changed. In the span of less than a year, Grandes both published her magnum opus on historical memory, El corazón helado (The Frozen Heart, 2007), and debuted as an op-ed page columnist for El País. In the words of one observer, “If the intimacy of her early novels disappears as she grounds her latter novels on a more pronounced ideological basis, the same can be said of her journalism. . . . The articles of ‘Mercado de Barceló’ are based on the existence of the columnist as a self, the protagonist of what she writes. In the second series of articles, which she began to write in 2008, this is far less the case.”45 Grandes’s novels from El corazón helado onward weighed in on issues ranging from the financial crisis to the pandemic. Her op-eds meanwhile took stock of the latest political news, often commenting on how seemingly minor parliamentary decisions contributed to structural inequalities. The simultaneous shift in Grandes’s fiction and nonfiction writing, however, had unintended consequences. From 2008 onward, many good- and bad-faith observers began reading the public political stances she made in her columns back into her novels, calling these “sectarian,” “Manichean,” or “dogmatic,” and identifying Grandes with the “moralizing tendency that has taken hold of the Spanish left.”46 What is most surprising is that Grandes herself embraced, rather than rejected, the criticism.47 Upon being accused by the former president of the Community of Madrid, Joaquín Leguina, of writing “Manichean” novels, Grandes responded approvingly: “If we are rigorously democratic,” she said, “then we must tell the Spanish Civil War in a Manichean way, because I do think there were good guys and bad guys.”48 Though Leguina and Grandes were nominally debating her

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historical novels, they were, in reality, debating political positions, continuing a back-and-forth over historical memory from years earlier.49 Behind each of their claims was a normative judgment about how Spanish history ought to be understood. For Leguina, argues the scholar Sebastiaan Faber, “the forward-looking spirit of reconciliation that made the transition possible came out of a rejection or overcoming not only of Francoism but also of the 1930s Left—which was, they claimed, marked by the same violent desire to exterminate its political enemies as the Nationalist side was.”50 Grandes, by contrast, rejected the false moral equivalency she believed such an argument implied. What if we were to entertain only the aesthetic dimensions of these criticisms? The sometimes thoughtful and sometimes thoughtless readings of Grandes’s work as “partisan,” “dogmatic,” or “Manichean” certainly reflect how the novels tell more than show their author’s politics. Most novelists would reveal to readers the virtue of certain political positions over the course of the novel by traveling the troubled waters of narrative persuasion. Grandes does not. Her tendency to tell, not show, betrays the influence of Galdós. According to one observer, she “derived from Galdós not only a background of social ideas but also a way of inserting such ideas into novels by intermingling their fictional stories with the real lives of historical figures.”51 This maneuver with historical figures indeed characterized the second half of Grandes’s career as a novelist. Following her first foray into historical fiction with El corazón helado in 2007, the author embarked on a six-novel literary project titled Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes of an endless war). The series of novels paid homage to Galdós in more ways than one. It borrowed both its title and episodic historical structure from Galdós’s Episodios nacionales, fortysix historical novels on Spain’s nineteenth century written between 1872 and 1912. Although Galdós’s books were not, historically speaking, novelas de tesis, he and his works are nonetheless frequently associated with the genre in the public consciousness. With her reinvention of the novel of ideas over the second half of her career, the same can also be said of Grandes herself.



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Ideas and the Novel A novel of ideas, like those of Ian McEwan, typically “intermingles with genre fiction,” blending intrigue, suspense, and violence with “heady concepts” from the physical and social sciences.52 Or it can also, as in the case of the Zimbabwean novelist Tendai Huchu, be “a source for thinking about thinking, a site of agile negotiation between private minds and public spaces.”53 But novels of ideas also might be something in between, ensconced in the middle ground that separates genre and philosophical fiction. The particular novels of ideas I have in mind are those that dig into the muck of politics and current affairs. They are works of fiction that take a didactic political stance, persuading readers of ideas relevant in what, following Jürgen Habermas, we call the public sphere. Put simply, they enlist fiction in the cause of opinion journalism. As the pioneering scholar of the novel of ideas Susan Suleiman argues, the novel of ideas uses fiction as a “vehicle . . . to persuade readers of the ‘correctness’ of a particular way of interpreting the world.”54 The novel of ideas was conceptualized in the early twentieth century, but to this day there is little agreement over the elements that make up the genre. Such inconsistency makes sense. However didactic they may be, novels of ideas don’t necessarily follow any pattern. Focusing on an array of early twentieth-century French novels, Suleiman theorized a number of features that have come to define the novels of ideas. Novels of ideas, she argued, tend to be “essentially teleological” insofar as the story they tell is determined by a specific end; their meaning tends to be excessively named so as to not be ambiguous; and the narrative tends to exhibit “an unambiguous, dualistic system of values” and a doctrinal intertext.55 Sianne Ngai, a newer theorist of the novel of ideas, has similarly arrived at a number of elemental features, pinpointing three that cut across the genre’s modern and contemporary examples: direct speech by narrators, direct speech by characters, and allegory. As she explains, “There is a will to ideas on the part of some novels that drives them toward the use of [these] three obtrusive techniques—techniques that cannot help but obtrude by working

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directly counter to the genre’s diachronicity, flexibility, and other oftnoted strengths.”56 Since the early twentieth century, scholars and critics have devised myriad ways to describe novels that advance political ideas through didactic techniques. In English, alongside the novel of ideas, the most popular terms have been the social problem novel, the ideological novel, and the thesis novel. Sometimes these terms have been used narrowly, other times interchangeably. This inconsistent nomenclature isn’t unique to English. In Spanish, for example, the comparable terms of art include novela de tesis, novela ideológica, novela social, and even novela política. In French, while the most popular term has been roman à thèse, other terms, such as romans d’idées, romans d’analyse, or romans sociaux, have also served much the same purpose. Whether in English, Spanish, or French, however, such terminology has most often been used in a narrow historical sense—that is, for the purpose of defining a number of related literary movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the exception of the novel of ideas, rarely have these terms been used to describe postwar or contemporary literature. The term novel of ideas may sound perfectly valid for describing Grandes’s postmillennial novels, or it may sound wildly inappropriate. This discrepancy has to do with literary history’s sometimes precise and sometimes ambiguous use of the term. More often than not, scholars have simply assumed its definition, coherence, and stability, taking for granted that the novel of ideas describes the kind of novel they are analyzing.57 Yet, as we saw with autofiction in the previous chapter, many scholars have dedicated significant energy to settling on a definition of the term. Some define the novel of ideas in a way that disentangles it from its cousin, the more general “ideological novel.”58 Others, especially scholars of Spanish literature, see the novel of ideas as a historical subset of the ideological novel, intimately related yet meaningfully distinct.59 Meanwhile, terms such as social problem novel or social novel have increasingly been used across periods and geographical divisions.60 Despite their differences, each of these terms ultimately refers to a very similar set of novelistic features.



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I use novel of ideas to stand in for a range of similar terms in Spanish. In this sense, I am going against how the term has most often been used to analyze Spanish-language fiction, which is strictly as a historical category that describes novels appearing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.61 I do this not only because a growing number of contemporary novels share many of the formal characteristics of the nineteenth-century novels of ideas but also because contemporary novelists such as Grandes appear to be working to revitalize the genre. In fact, the novel of ideas—in Spain, but also across the world—has reemerged in the twenty-first century, with writers from Viet Thanh Nguyen to Pankaj Mishra avowing its significance for our moment.62 “As it has on various occasions across the twentieth century,” writes Ignacio Javier López, perhaps the most influential scholar of Spain’s novelas de tesis, “the novel of ideas reappears once the social situation drives writers to participate with their fictional work in public debates in which literature and politics are confused anew.”63 Elision between fiction and nonfiction is central to the persuasive power of the novel of ideas. In this way, it is like other literary genres discussed in this book, specifically historical autofiction and literary populism, the subject of the next chapter. What distinguishes the novel of ideas from these related forms of writing is its use of didactic narrative strategies. Historical autofiction, as we have seen, confuses fiction and nonfiction when it sheathes political argument in first-person memoir. Literary populism, as we will see, blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction through its use of formal features that announce objectivity and balance. These narrative forms embed political critique in their structural elements, largely hiding them from unsuspecting readers. The novel of ideas, by contrast, wears its persuasive techniques on its sleeve. Alongside its revival by literary writers, the novel of ideas has also been revived among literary theorists. Dispatching with attempts to define the genre, scholars have instead turned their attention to readerly concerns. “The novel of ideas,” writes Ngai, “reflects the challenge posed by the integration of externally developed concepts . . . into a genre

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famous for its versatility.”64 That challenge is, in many ways, a hermeneutic one, one hinging on how readers read rather than on how writers write. In her book The African Novel of Ideas, Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues, “To call something a ‘novel of ideas’ is to contemplate the figures in novels who have ideas: their structural role and situation; how their thoughts are given narrative shape; and the realms between which they mediate [between] the material and the ideal.”65 For Jackson, “externally developed concepts” in novels challenge us because they show just how much novels in general depend on the material world around them. Unlike other kinds of fiction, novels of ideas simply don’t pretend they are above or beyond ideology. Instead, they embrace their embeddedness within it. The question of whether novels should avow their own embeddedness in ideology has elicited several important criticisms of the novel of ideas. Consider Northrop Frye’s famous claim that “the technical problem [for the novel] is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.”66 If this is true, failing to do so, it seems, could result in a novel of ideas—that is, a novel in which theory remains on the surface, narratively insoluble. While this account of narrative solubility seems plausible when describing novels that attempt to incorporate ideas that come from nuclear physics or metaphysics, it does not seem plausible for describing novels looking to incorporate ideas from current affairs. Unlike nuclear physics or metaphysics, current affairs are meant to be debated in a public setting by the broadest citizenry possible. Such ideas, almost by definition, cannot sit on top of narrative; rather, they must be baked into it. Another criticism of the novel of ideas concerns the question of absorption. Many scholars, either implicitly or explicitly, believe that these novels’ techniques are so obvious to readers that they foreclose the possibility of readerly absorption. The appearance of these ideas, in other words, continuously reminds the reader that what they are reading is fiction because they cannot credibly fit into a fictional narrative framework. For Ngai, the culprits of the novel of ideas’ absorptive defects are allegory and direct speech. On her account, these features



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show just how incompatible the novel of ideas is with realism. Thus, she writes, it should be no coincidence that so many novels of ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were penned by Symbolists, Decadents, and late Romantics. As if echoing these criticisms, J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello tells readers, “Realism has never been comfortable with ideas.”67 Yet the opposite is true for Spanish literature.68 Spanish Realists, not Symbolists or Romantics, were the ones who gave the novel of ideas its late nineteenth-century prominence. Many realists who wrote novels of ideas in Spain also wrote regularly for the press, developing a public-intellectual persona that, like Grandes’s, allowed them to blend fiction and nonfiction in their commentary on pressing issues of social concern. Seeing Realism through the lens of Spain, as opposed to its French and Anglophone counterparts, might allow us to see how the novel of ideas was—and still is—meaningfully connected to daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and the rhythms of the public sphere.

Argumentative Plotting Grandes’s fiction only began to evince a strong connection to the rhythms of the public sphere a year before her promotion to the op-ed page. With El corazón helado, published in early 2007, she made clear her desire to opine on a subject that had swept up Spain’s political commentariat: the Historical Memory Law. Though the law would not be approved by the Spanish Congress until October of that year, the debate in the court of public opinion had long been roiling, with notable intellectuals issuing opinions ranging from thoughtful (“the victors had forty years to bury their victims . . . the defeated never could”) to exasperated (“the objective of the historical memory law is to draw a sharp line between good guys and bad guys”).69 When the measure was passed in the fall of 2008, the law was seen as a victory for the socialdemocratic government and the left more broadly. In addition to removing symbols of Francoism from public spaces and granting nationality to exiles, the Historical Memory Law formally condemned

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judicial and extrajudicial decisions carried out by Francoist forces during the coup and subsequent dictatorship as “unjust” and “illegitimate.”70 It also assigned the obligation to open the country’s thousands of unmarked mass graves to the government, instead of to private civic associations.71 Despite its tone, the law was largely symbolic. Yet many saw it as a necessary first step toward overcoming the country’s legal and political silence on the crimes of the dictatorship. Largely overlooked, however, was the law’s silence on the dictatorship’s economic crimes. This was to be Grandes’s contribution with El corazón helado. Throughout its nearly one thousand pages of prose, the novel asks readers to contrast two fates of twentieth-century Spanish history: One, represented in the novel by the Carrión family, was generational wealth, geographic stability, and the unacknowledged privileges of being on the right side of a dictatorial regime. The other, represented by the Fernández family, was political exile, financial precarity, and having to rebuild a life in an unchosen place, language, and environment. Though numerous novels, films, and other works of literature and art had previously explored the diverging fortunes of political exile and political favoritism, few had explicitly turned their attention to the role of economics. Indeed, the novel, just like the new op-ed column, announced a major shift in Grandes’s oeuvre: out were the romantic and sexual themes that had helped her fiction reach critical and commercial success, in were the purportedly serious themes of economics, politics, and the long history of the Spanish Civil War. With this shift in theme also came a shift in genre. As one of the novel’s epigraphs reads, “Poetry of circumstance, whatever the circumstance, can be awful; but, regardless, all poetry is poetry of circumstance. . . . Why, then, has it had such poor critical success? Why, now, must people apologize for weighing its aesthetic karats?”72 The epigraph comes from the writer Francisco Ayala, who coined the term novelist intellectual. Though in the epigraph he is reflecting on a particular form of poetry called “poetry of circumstance,” he could have just as well been talking about op-ed novels, specifically the novel of ideas. The epigraph describes Grandes’s novelistic aims by other means.



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Since Spain’s transition to democracy, only a handful of contemporary novels have been read as novels of ideas, and Grandes’s were not among them.73 Even upon the publication of El corazón helado, very few scholars, if any, had read Grandes’s literary writing as driven by ideological commitment.74 If anything, she was criticized for not displaying enough of it. Grandes herself opted to label her later novels according to the more generic term political novel.75 Either way, the novels themselves reveal just how closely tied her conception of the novel is to contemporary opinion journalism. According to Grandes, her historical novels pursued “the complicated task of finding an adequate tone that could conjugate the work of documentation with the characteristics of the novelized story.” Avoiding propaganda, these novels instead opted for persuasion, “because propaganda can harm even the very ideology it supposedly advocates.”76 Yet, like the modern op-ed page, these novels also recognized their own embeddedness in politics: “The official history of facts has always been told in a sectarian and partial way.”77 Why should Grandes’s novels pretend otherwise? El corazón helado partly narrates how a middle-aged man comes to terms with his family’s nebulous past. That middle-aged man, Álvaro Carrión, is a professor of physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid and the only male in the family who decided not to take up the family’s real estate business. That business is at the heart of the story. Built by Carrión’s father, Julio Carrión, the family’s enterprise thrived under the Franco regime and subsequent return to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, as the son discovers through his investigation into his family’s history, his father’s business was built illicitly on property theft. The father, it turns out, was a political chameleon. In 1937, thinking Franco’s coup would be quickly suppressed, he became a member of the Socialist and Communist youth. Two years later, upon realizing his miscalculation, he switched allegiances. Then, in 1941, he fought on the eastern front with Spain’s Blue Division, a legion of soldiers sent by Franco to support Hitler and Mussolini. Following the end of World War II, Carrión thought the days of Francoist rule were numbered. So, in the immediate postwar period, he switched allegiances yet again, escaping to France and befriending Republican exiles in

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Paris—most notably, a man named Ignacio Fernández. Through a combination of persuasion, intrafamilial backstabbing, and the pressures of economic hardship, the Fernández family gave Carrión’s father power of attorney over their properties in Spain on the promise that he would sell them off and send the money back to Paris. Rather than keep his word, Carrión’s father used his new legal authority as the basis for a business opportunity. El corazón helado opens in 2005 at the funeral of Carrión’s father. There, Carrión notices a young woman whom he does not know. Later, upon being tasked with arranging his bereaved father’s finances and the family’s sizable inheritance, Carrión discovers who the woman is: Raquel Fernández, the granddaughter of the man, Ignacio Fernández, from whom his father had stolen property. Fernández and her family make up an integral part of the novel: the encounter between Carrión and Fernández at the funeral, and their subsequent love affair, are what spark Carrión’s interest in uncovering his family’s past. While he had until then passively bought into the transition to democracy’s culture of keeping silent about Spain’s fascist history, Fernández hadn’t. She had instead begun to question the country’s official narrative about its recent past. Like many grandchildren who had come to question these histories at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Fernández comes from a Republican family that remained in Spain during the Civil War. Her great-grandfather worked for the Madrid Defense Council, while her grandfather and great-uncle fought in the city trenches. In 1939, the Fernández family fled to France. For more than three decades, they remained in exile, until the death of Franco in 1975 brought many Spanish exiles, including the Fernández family, back to Spain. In the novel, a seminal moment occurs in 1977, when Fernández’s grandfather takes his granddaughter with him to visit Carrión’s father in an attempt to recover the properties for which he was never compensated. The memory of her grandfather weeping in silence after failing to secure what was rightly his is what sparked Fernández’s own questioning of Spain’s official history and pursuit of justice against the Carrión family.



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The persuasive ends of the novel are clear as day. Readers are meant to empathize with Álvaro’s coming-of-age story, where asking questions of his family’s past leads him to understanding Spanish history better and wishing to change things in the present. As the scholar Carmen de Urioste puts it, the novel “calls upon the Spaniards of 2008 to become Álvaros and to investigate the past of our non-exiled elders, with the goal of finding and confronting the true face of our society.”78 Yet readers are also meant to cheer on Fernández’s decision to take matters into her own hands: upon realizing that Carrión’s father’s company wants to purchase her apartment, she uses her position at a savings bank to extort the father in an act of familial revenge, threatening bad PR in addition to withholding the sale of the apartment Carrión’s father needs in order to start a new construction project. Though readers may pick up on the novel’s critical stance toward Fernández’s “neoliberal feminism,” they also witness the reconciliation that takes place at the end of the novel: Fernández joins Carrión for a family barbecue in a symbolic unification of the two families.79 Thus, Grandes’s novel ultimately proposes a redemptive account of the country’s transition from fascism to democracy. What matters for understanding the novel’s techniques of literary persuasion, however, is not so much the plot itself but rather how the novel goes about relaying it. El corazón helado isn’t coy about its petition to readers. First, the novel “tells” its politics in a number of ways that echo long-standing criticisms of the novels of ideas: its narrative drive toward a specific political end, its embrace of a dualistic perception of society, and its explicit naming of the very meaning it tries to create through narrative. Second, the novel uses dialogue to stage political arguments. In this, it borrows perhaps the most well-worn trope of the novel of ideas. From Galdós in the nineteenth century to David Foster Wallace at the turn of the twenty-first, dialogue, numerous scholars have pointed out, has provided writers with a vehicle through which “ideas [can] seem to exist both ‘in themselves’ and in more embodied forms.”80 Telling, not showing, and staged dialogue: these are the two features that overwhelmingly account for what many observers

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perceive to be Grandes’s moral didacticism, political one-sidedness, and social Manicheanism. They undergird the perception that she writes what Suleiman calls “authoritarian fiction.” El corazón helado regularly uses political convictions to stand in for interpersonal dynamics, signaling differences among people through their political preferences. In one of the novel’s opening scenes, Carrión seats us at the dinner table, where we witness one of his family’s “monumental fights.” “In the dining room,” he explains, “the balance of power reproduced the parliamentary arrangement. The right had an absolute majority, but the left—my wife, my brother-in-law Adolfo, and me, with the passive and almost always silent support of my sister Angélica—was riled up, feisty. . . . These were times of war, and although the conflict was merely symbolic and ideological, necessity sharpened one’s instincts.”81 This is our introduction to many of the novel’s characters. We know immediately on which side of the political aisle they sit. Such political marking happens not only with the Carrión family but also with their counterparts, the Fernández family. Lest we forget why all of the Fernández men risked their lives to defend Madrid, readers are repeatedly reminded that the family is “red,” “red,” “red.”82 The novel, in this sense, relies on symbolic language that is meant to stand in for a set of ideas and political commitments that are never fleshed out. “Captain, Republic, exile, red”—these, we are told, are “almost liturgical . . . venerable words . . . words as beautiful as gems, as coins, as a natural spring that sprouts in the middle of the desert.”83 But what did it mean to be a “red”? The repeated mentions of the Fernández family’s symbolic attachments to left-wing politics are so numerous that they raise an eyebrow. Readers may be forgiven for thinking these symbols are the novel’s way of overcompensating, politically, for the fact that the Fernández family belonged to the landed bourgeoisie.84 Grandes’s novel, like opinion journalism, inverts the structure we have come to expect from narrative fiction and nonfiction. Rather than showing us the evidence for a claim to follow, it instead makes the claim first. Whether that claim involves the truth of certain political ideas (“no one with the capacity to think, to feel, to justly reflect on reality



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could honestly opt for a different path”) or how people come to discover that truth (“it was at that moment, not a second earlier or a second later, when he felt a lightbulb go off in his mind”), claims are what drive the novel’s narrative momentum.85 Rather than assigning meaning to objects, places, and actions, readerly curiosity instead focuses on agreeing or not with the political ideas that are presented. Such argumentative plotting, in fact, sets the novel’s mood. We are told regarding the exile of Spaniards in France, for example, that “things simply were the way they were.”86 Yet such flourishes of telling rather than showing have a didactic purpose. They suggest that at the heart of politics lie simple and straightforward decisions. Set within the limited sphere of an extended family, the political decisions in Grandes’s novel seem at once easier to implement and more impactful than the domestic backdrop would imply. Polities across Europe have been conditioned to think of politics as the tug and pull of parliamentary debate, the technocratic calculations of feasible policy, and the challenge of persuading citizens to support a party, candidate, or movement. Yet politics, the novel argues, can be understood without such details. Politics, after all, involves the uncomplicated matter of holding principles and sticking to them. Those who say otherwise, the novel warns, are engaging in a process of mystification. In the novel, fictional characters make political decisions that, in the lived world, would likely be much more fraught. Take the example of Eugenio Sánchez Delgado, a character who, despite being a committed Falangist that fought alongside Carrión’s father in the Blue Division on the eastern front, has what appears to be an admirable ethical sensibility. Upon returning to Spain, Sánchez Delgado dresses down Carrión’s father for taking advantage of his power of attorney over the Fernández family properties. “That’s stealing, Julio,” he says. “Even if there’s a law, even if it’s legal, even if everyone does it. That’s stealing. And I won’t go there.”87 Sánchez Delgado is, for the novel, the exception that proves the rule. Honest and idealistic to a fault, his simple moral compass, it is suggested, was available to everyone on the political right,

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even the fascists and military plotters who launched the coup against a democratic government. If Sánchez Delgado is the idealized exception, the other right-wing figures in the novel represent the rule. Many come across as unintelligent, ignorant, and flat in precisely the same way their left-leaning, thoughtful, and assertive counterparts do not.88 Far from the class-based account of history it purports to be, the novel instead often indulges in facile moral fantasies of pure good and pure evil. If telling, not showing, is one facet of Grandes’s novel of ideas, staged dialogue is the other. At the end of the novel, Carrión finally confronts his siblings about their family history. “You’re not going to tell us anything we don’t know,” Carrión’s brother says. “It’s ancient history, which at this point completely lacks any importance in any way, and, moreover, we shouldn’t judge, because . . . neither you nor I . . . lived through that period.”89 Also, he continues, “[our brother] already told me that story about the note with the telephone number inside a folder with papers from the Blue Division, but the truth is that I didn’t believe one word of it.”90 The scene that ensues stages a number of arguments in the Spanish public sphere over historical memory. Readers learn some of the primary tenets of the anti-historical memory position: that investigating the past doesn’t matter, that those who didn’t live through the war shouldn’t pass judgment on the decisions made by those who did, and that the sources for historical memory are untrustworthy and likely illegitimate. The ensuing back-and-forth represents a veritable mise-en-scène of literary persuasion. The brother and sister play the role of uncritical conservatives for whom history is best left undisturbed, while Carrión plays the born-again advocate prepared to teach his siblings what they don’t know. After learning how the family had conspired to control the Fernández properties, Carrión’s sister speaks up: “You say it in a way that just sounds . . . Yes, Republicans had their properties expropriated,” she says, “but that wasn’t stealing because there were laws, courts . . . It was a result of war, no? An exceptional situation, and they weren’t here . . . They had abandoned everything, they had renounced everything, so to speak.”91 Carrión volleys back. “No,” he says, “we can’t say that . . . They



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didn’t renounce anything, they only fled to save their lives. And they had reasons for doing so. The two men of their family who didn’t manage to flee were executed.” “But dad’s thing was different,” his sister replies. “He wasn’t a thief . . . What he did was legal.” By this point, Carrión can no longer hold in his contempt. “Legal? This goddamn country was illegal . . . ! Everything, inside and out, was a goddamn illegality! . . . The laws were illegal, the judges were illegal, the courts . . .”92 The siblings take a commonsensical approach to the matter, relying on clichéd thinking about the spoils of war and equating what is legal with what is ethical. Carrión, meanwhile, takes a critical approach, exposing the falsity of each one of their assumptions. For the siblings, the cat is out of the bag: their newly acquired knowledge of their father’s misdeeds cannot be erased, and they must now confront the ethical dilemma of how to act on this new information. As the dialogue comes to an end, each of the siblings plays their part in the ideological script: Carrión’s brother yells and attempts a failed character assassination while his sister begs to bury this history in an effort to keep everything under wraps and preserve the family’s reputation. All the while, Carrión offers little comfort to his siblings, embodying reason’s indifference to kinship ties. The boisterousness of this final scene can be deceiving. Even in a novel of ideas, the most vital politics can become lifeless. Despite Carrión’s newfound political enlightenment, it remains to be seen how the shift from apathy to activism occurred and whether it will last. Carrión’s political thinking is barely shown in the first place, and, by the end of the novel, his dramatic intellectual transformation is also only told, not shown. The scholar Geneviève Champeau makes a convincing case for how El corazón helado, Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina, and other contemporary novels about historical memory wield forms of literary persuasion that, like the roman à thèse, employ dualistic structures, exemplary stories, and narrative authority to make public claims about history. Yet by only focusing on the novels themselves, rather than on the writers who write them, promising arguments such as these miss the broader relationship novels of ideas have with the public sphere. Grandes spoke in

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public not only as a novelist but also as a journalist. Telling, not showing, was part and parcel of Grandes’s persona as a public intellectual, not just as a novelist. She told it like it was, even when she didn’t quite have all the facts.

Checking Sources Grandes’s most infamous op-ed column appeared in the fall of 2008, less than a year into her new job. At the time, the social-democratic Socialist Party was debating whether to install a plaque at the Spanish Congress in memory of Madre Maravillas, a canonized Carmelite nun who had founded more than three dozen convents across postwar Spain. Grandes vehemently disagreed with the idea. “‘Allow yourself to be taught, allow yourself to receive orders, allow yourself to be subjected and disregarded, and you will be perfect,’” she wrote. “This may sound like a sadomasochistic agreement, but it is advice from the Madre Maravillas.” Her commentary then took a turn toward irony: “Can you imagine the joy she would have felt upon falling into the hands of a gang of militia, young, armed and—mmm!—sweaty? In 1974, on her deathbed, she would have remembered with unspeakable pleasure that intense disregard, that fount of supreme perfection. Debeatify her, please.”93 The reaction to the column was swift. “Are we faced with the old and beloved Spanish joke about the pleasure of raped nuns?” wrote her fellow El País columnist Antonio Muñoz Molina, referring to widespread reports during the Franco period of nuns having been raped by Republican soldiers during the Civil War. He then issued his objection: “There’s no need to imagine how thousands of people felt . . . upon falling into the hands of a gang of militia.”94 Gregorio Marañón y Bertrán de Lis, a member of the executive board of Prisa, El País’s parent company, also weighed in. “It is ethically intolerable,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, “to ridicule a woman—also a Catholic Saint—by writing that she would have enjoyed being raped.”95 Unlike Muñoz Molina, Marañón had a personal investment in the object of Grandes’s ridicule: his mother was a niece of Madre Maravillas. “What’s notable about this garbage,”



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observed Hermann Tertsch, a former columnist at El País who had recently decamped to its conservative counterpart, ABC, “is that we have crossed the Rubicon. No one is scandalized that a newspaper in Spain, which touts its decorum and quality, publishes on its back page, no doubt as entertainment, an apologia for the rape of a nun.”96 Realizing her mistake, Grandes quickly apologized. “If I did not manage to express [myself ] with sufficient clarity,” she wrote in a reply to Muñoz Molina the next day, “I am sorry.” She then clarified the object of her irony: she was not making fun of nuns who were raped during the war; instead, she was ridiculing Maravillas and her dictum for women to allow themselves to be subjected. It was Maravillas, she claimed, “who [had] stooped to the level of old jokes about the feminine condition, in general, and of nuns, in particular.”97 For Grandes, that meant she was fair game. Grandes was not alone in taking issue with Maravillas and her teachings, which involved self-flagellation, sleeping on the floor, and a “permanent desire for humiliation”: even the ultraconservative Spanish Episcopal Conference, the administrative hierarchy of Spain’s Catholic Church, had publicly spoken out against them. Following an El País investigation into the recruitment of underage girls by convents established by Maravillas, the Catholic authorities did not mince words: “These things shouldn’t happen,” one of the organization’s spokespeople said. “It propagates a very restrictive message about Christ and, of course, there is no justification for their secrecy.”98 No matter. Grandes’s approach did not persuade Muñoz Molina, her most persistent critic. “A reader has kindly sent me some information I did not know,” he wrote in a follow-up letter to the editor. “The phrase ‘Allow yourself to be taught . . .’ is not from Madre Maravillas, nor is it directed at her nuns. It is one of the Sayings of Light and Love by Saint John of the Cross, and its addressee, in the feminine, is the spirit.”99 Muñoz Molina appeared to have caught Grandes red-handed: her interpretation of the phrase about women allowing themselves to be subjected, he showed, misidentified both its context and its subject. The phrase wasn’t directed at women. And it wasn’t from Madre Maravillas. Whatever Grandes’s criticisms of Maravillas, the evidence she provided

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didn’t substantiate them. In other words, she gave her political conclusion but failed to show how she got there. Yet, for Muñoz Molina, the worst part about Grandes’s article wasn’t even the joke, which might have deserved criticism but could ultimately be excused. What was inexcusable, he claimed, was that Grandes’s comments demonstrated profound historical ignorance. If the left was serious about recovering historical memory, it should look “to consult historians free of any suspicion or . . . to recover the testimony of Republicans and socialists with no stains on their records.” Without these sources, it would be impossible to understand the “horror of the crimes that were being committed in Madrid under the protection of the collapse of legality provoked by the military uprising.”100 Grandes’s joke, in the eyes of Muñoz Molina, revealed her lack of political seriousness. It evinced her belief in the sanctity of those who fought for the Second Republic and the evil of anyone who, like Maravillas, might have made a different decision. As Muñoz Molina tried to impress upon his readers, fascists were not the only ones who committed war crimes such as rape and murder. Against the picture painted by Muñoz Molina and others, Grandes’s op-ed, however, does not appear to have been historically ignorant. Since the immediate postwar period, the rape of nuns by Republican soldiers has been an oft-cited evil committed by the pro-democratic side of the Spanish Civil War. Revisionist historians such as Pío Moa have used the atrocity to substantiate the idea, dominant among sectors of both the right and left, that “both [Republican and Francoist] zones suffered official and uncontrolled repression, both witnessed petitions for humanity and clemency, and both managed to overcome the most brutal manifestations of terror, without completely eliminating them.”101 In an editorial weighing in on Grandes’s column, the online right-wing publication Libertad Digital made that exact move, claiming that 283 nuns had been tortured and killed, “indeed, many of them . . . raped before being murdered.”102 Yet such claims are scarcely substantiated by historical evidence. Some scholars have placed the estimate in the low single digits.



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“The sexual molestation of around one dozen nuns and the deaths of 296, just over 1.3 per cent of the female clergy, is shocking,” writes historian Paul Preston, “but of a notably lower order of magnitude than the fate of women in the rebel zone.”103 Although it is certainly possible that sexual violence against nuns took place, “there is no documented case of the rape of a nun during the Spanish Civil War, although there were cases of brutal gang rape against laywomen,” writes the scholar Mary Vincent, and “the frequent references to the rape of nuns in Nationalist war propaganda were fictions which depicted the victimhood of the Spanish church and the inhumanity of its assailants.”104 The imagery of nuns being raped by Republican soldiers, it appears, was largely propagated by two factors: on the one hand, the Francoist postwar government, which purported to have investigated these crimes; on the other, the rhetoric from decades earlier by radical anticlerical republicans such as Alejandro Lerroux, who, as an elected representative in 1906, called on the “young barbarians of today” to “go in and sack the decadent and miserable civilization of this unfortunate country, destroy its temples, finish off its gods, tear the veils from its nuns and turn them into mothers to invigorate the species.”105 By the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, these lines had been relegated to the dustbin of history.106 In fact, given the discrepancy between actual figures uncovered by government researchers and the propaganda delivered to the Spanish people, the Francoist discourse about the rape of nuns was likely intended to cover up the government’s own misdeeds— namely, the numerous documented cases of gang rape in Francoist prisons.107 Yet focusing on statistical and documentary evidence misses the appeal of Grandes’s argument. Such evidence may have been persuasive to some readers but was of secondary interest to her core audience. Instead, Grandes’s mode of persuasion in her op-eds involved speaking directly and seemingly off the cuff. This is what made both her novels and columns stick out in a sea of relative intellectual conformity. While Muñoz Molina, Marías, and Cercas all hewed to the stereotype of the measured and thoughtful intellectual, Grandes sought to emulate the

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ideal of the revolutionary intellectual, someone who spoke to the people as one of them in order to reflect and channel their indignation. Understanding the reasons why people chose certain political ideas over others, which might inform recruitment efforts, remained tangential to Grandes’s ultimate literary and journalistic project. What was central, instead, was the end result: simplifying political choice to advance leftwing political ideas.

The Nut Graf In 2015, Grandes took a break from writing fiction about the past. Since El corazón helado, her magnum opus, she had published three more lengthy historical novels over the course of eight years: Inés y la alegría (Inés and happiness, 2010), El lector de Julio Verne (The reader of Jules Verne, 2012), and Las tres bodas de Manolita (Manolita’s three weddings, 2014). These three novels amounted to half of a planned six-novel literary project, Episodios de una guerra interminable, which would focus on the anti-Francoist resistance during some of the most challenging economic times of the Franco era. Instead, Grandes’s new novel, Los besos en el pan (Kisses on bread), shifted gears, turning its attention to the immediate present and to one of the most pressing topics of the moment. But it was perhaps no coincidence that the immediate present, too, involved another challenging economic period in Spain’s history. Published at the end of 2015, Los besos en el pan tackled the subject of the 2008 global financial crisis, or what, in Spain, was simply called la crisis. Unemployment, evictions, austerity—for nearly a decade, these became the most pressing issues in the Spanish public sphere, temporarily sidelining concerns over historical memory. In the early 2010s, Spain’s unemployment situation grew dire. Between 2007 and 2013, the official unemployment rate ballooned from around 8 to nearly 27 percent.108 During the same period, the country’s youth unemployment rate (ages 15–24) swelled from around 18 percent to nearly 56 percent.109 Evictions and austerity followed. During one quarter in 2012, more than five hundred people were being evicted every day.110 Meanwhile,



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the country’s Socialist-led government, together with the conservative opposition, swiftly passed a balanced budget amendment to the constitution—only the second amendment in the history of Spain’s 1978 Constitution—which effectively placed a permanent cap on public spending.111 Like in the United States, Spain’s financial crisis began with a mortgage crisis. But unlike in the United States, the financial crisis quickly turned into something much broader: a generalized economic crisis that forced many Spaniards to reconsider their country’s economic, social, political, and legal history. All of a sudden, everything from feminism to the Spanish Constitution, from refugee rights to political corruption and the entrenchment of the two-party system, were on the table. If El corazón helado gave Grandes the cultural license to finally comment on serious topics in her op-ed column, years of writing that op-ed column gave her the political capital to write her new novel. “I was able to write this novel,” she admitted regarding Los besos en el pan, “because I’ve been a columnist for many years. As columnists, we’re required to narrate reality. . . . We ought to find a point of view, an oblique, different view . . . [and] I ended up having a view of the crisis.”112 Her novel about the economic crisis came partly out of her denunciations of the privatization of health care and education in Madrid.113 Mostly, however, the book seems to have emerged from one specific column written for El País Semanal in 2012.114 The piece in some ways harkened back to Grandes’s early column writing. Titled “El amor de su vida,” the article tells a fictional story about two elderly nursing-home residents who fall in love while Spain’s economic crisis wreaks havoc all around them. Having lost its state subsidies, the nursing home must close down. The story ends happily if bitterly, as the couple tries to hire several of the recently unemployed workers to assist them at their new home. Blending social and economic critique, the short story represents the tragic moral force of Grandes’s fiction and opinion writing at its best.115 Critics did not know what to make of Los besos en el pan. Some issued a boilerplate criticism of Grandes. The novel, one critic wrote, had been transparently written by a partisan, a “polemical writer who is

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inspired by a complacent, moralizing, and cliché-happy leftism.”116 “Strictly speaking,” wrote another, in the novel “there are no characters, only representative types.” This fact, the critic continued, “will be celebrated by those who like to see in a novel what’s in plain sight and what they already know. More so if it aligns with their own life. Or with their own opinions.”117 Observers of Grandes’s career had seen this script before. The criticisms she received were, in many cases, the same ones that had been leveled against El corazón helado and her other historical novels, whose explicit political arguments, some thought, turned them into political propaganda. Yet as she did with her first foray into the op-ed novel, Grandes embraced the criticism. Los besos en el pan, she said, was nothing short of “a declaration of principles” amid a war for democracy and national sovereignty.118 Criticizing Grandes for depicting representative types, however, also points to what distinguishes a novel like El corazón helado from one like Los besos en el pan. While the first kind of novel expresses its political opinions by telling, not showing, the second kind wields allegory. “Whether they end up as victims or criminals, dupes, charlatans, or false prophets, whether they elicit pity or scorn,” argues Suleiman, “negative exemplary subjects are opposed to positive exemplary ones as falsehood is opposed to truth.”119 For Suleiman, allegorical figures— which she calls “exemplary subjects”—fuel the didactic and persuasive machinery of the novel of ideas. Suleiman is not alone in focusing on allegory. For Ngai, flat allegorical characters are central to the novel of ideas, which ultimately tends “to produce just types rather than characters who develop through interpersonal dialogue.”120 Yet these invocations of allegory involve only individual characters. Los besos en el pan, however, is a novel not about any one person or family in particular but about many people and families who happen to live within several blocks of each other in central Madrid. Plot is almost nowhere to be seen. The novel is choral par excellence: there’s the octogenarian grandmother whose job it seems is to get smiles out of her family members despite the economic chaos; there’s the journalist who worked for Madrid’s major regional TV station



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whose only memory of the job is her pink slip; and there’s the neighborhood hairdresser who hears everyone’s problems but can’t seem to speak about her own. Rather than give us one or several stories to follow, the novel instead narrates the interrelated lives of these and many other characters who live in the neighborhood over the course of a year. The novel’s spiritual protagonist is ultimately the neighborhood itself: In this neighborhood, marble vestibules and plaster walls, the rich and the poor, have always lived together. The old residents resisted the disbanding of the seventies, when it became trendy to leave the center; they tolerated la movida of the eighties, when the falling prices brought together a new group of settlers that arrived carrying shelves from the Rastro, posters of Che Guevara, and Hindu clothing that might serve to adorn the walls, to cover the bed, or to cover the dilapidated sofa, barely rescued from the trash; and, in the nineties, they survived, making a comeback when, during the first rehearsal of the housing bubble, it turned out that the coolest thing to do was to live in the center.121

In this paragraph-long, three-decade history of an unnamed neighborhood in central Madrid, Grandes’s novel betrays the experience of a longtime local newspaper columnist. The way the narrative moves across time but stays in one place fulfills the task of quickly and persuasively summarizing the neighborhood’s history. Its persuasiveness is, in part, allegorical: rising prices and inflation in the 1970s, falling prices and recessions in the 1980s, economic boom in the 1990s, and economic collapse late in the first decade of the 2000s. These are all very familiar plot points in the story of economic shifts across the North Atlantic since the 1970s. Allegory here and throughout the novel is used in a different way than is typical of novels of ideas. It does not involve individual characters standing in for political ideas. Nor does it involve a representative story of individual actions and decisions. Indeed, the allegory in Grandes’s novel concerns economic systems whose moral agency is impossible to pin on any one person. The “old residents” as much as the “new group of settlers” seem to have a moral valence to their actions (e.g., “they survived”). So, too, do the particular fashions of each

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decade: first “it became trendy to leave the center,” then “the coolest thing to do was to live in the center.” Yet over the course of the paragraph, it becomes clear that individual actions in one decade—and in one sentence—fail to shape what occurs in the next. In the end, there is no dialectic. Each action by a group or an individual has just as much of an impact on society as the next—which is to say, none at all. In opinion journalism, this kind of allegorical writing frequently appears in the part of the op-ed that is called the nut graf. The nut graf, typically the second or third paragraph in an op-ed, condenses, summarizes, and “sweeps.” It explains, contextualizes, and tells. It also allegorizes and forecasts the argument of the piece to come, doing the work of ideological cohesion in a neat set of lines rather than in between them. Such is the function of the paragraph describing the recent history of the neighborhood. Though many novels have parts that function in this way, few novels see summary and contextual sweep as their guiding purpose. The uniqueness of Los besos en el pan stems from its transformation of allegorical summary from a journalistic into a literary mode.122 Consider another moment of allegorical summary in the novel. At one point, as we read the description of patrons washing down their sorrows at the bar, things suddenly take a very real turn. “That day, in the bar, people only talked about Germany. The banks, the debt, Merkel, the Greeks, and my grandson who is leaving and my next-door neighbor, who says he’s leaving, too, and the doorwoman for number 12, who is already there but has only found a job washing dishes in a restaurant. Pascual doesn’t say anything, but thinks that, one day, he, too, will have to move to Germany.”123 What begins as a commentary on the bailout negotiations for Greece quickly becomes an allegory for how the financial crisis has transformed the economies of southern Europe: unemployment in the south has fueled so much immigration to Germany that the idea of moving there to make a living appears inevitable. Empirically, these transformations bear out: from 2011 to 2012, immigration to Germany from Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy surged between 40 and 45 percent, including more than 50 percent among Spaniards and more



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than 70 percent among Greeks.124 Much of the material that grounds Grandes’s novel is arguably more typical of opinion journalism than it is of fiction. Ultimately, too, is her mode of crafting allegorical summaries in the service of political arguments. Los besos en el pan fits uncomfortably and nonchronologically between the explorations of gender and identity that defined the first half of Grandes’s career and the historical novels that characterized the second half. For many scholars, Los besos en el pan does not fit into either of these tendencies. When seen through the lens of literary history, the novel indeed looks very much like an outlier. Our perspective changes, however, when we read the novel as an extension of Grandes’s opinion journalism. Broadening the purview of literary history in this way not only helps us make sense of how to read the novel and where to situate it within her oeuvre; it also helps us realize that the novel is perhaps the quintessential expression of the second half of Grandes’s literary career—as a public intellectual and as a writer of novels of ideas. Like El corazón helado and the novels in the series Episodios de una guerra interminable, Los besos en el pan is both a novel of ideas and one that directly emerges from Grandes’s opinion journalism. In fact, precisely because of its false perception as an outlier, Los besos en el pan is perhaps the most persuasive example of how opinion journalism and the novel of ideas shaped Grandes’s work. Without considering both opinion and literary writing together, her oeuvre looks discontinuous. Taken together, however, few literary projects could have been more continuous with her work, both fictional and nonfictional, than a novel about Spain’s then-ongoing economic crisis. On November 27, 2021, at the age of sixty-one, Grandes died of cancer. About a month before her death, she completed what would be her last, posthumously published novel. Many expected her final work to be Mariano en el Bidasoa, the planned sixth and final book in her series Episodios de una guerra interminable. Mariano en el Bidasoa was to narrate Spain’s internal economic migration during the Franco era through a story of clandestine organizing and the origins of one of Spain’s major labor unions. Shortly after her death, those expectations

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were dashed by Grandes’s editor. The novel she had completed was not Mariano but something else, he said. Suddenly, the rumor mill began to churn: Grandes’s new novel, observers speculated, would be a seventh, unplanned addition to the Episodios series.125 That expectation, too, would not come to pass. Instead, the novel Grandes completed before her untimely death had nothing to do with her unfinished historical series. Rather, it concerned life under lockdown during a global pandemic, a parenthesis from her historical novels in the mold of Los besos en el pan. Published in October 2022, her posthumous novel, titled Todo va a mejorar (Everything will get better), reflects on the political consequences of lockdown, showing just how easily pandemic politics can slide into near dictatorship.126 That Grandes wrote another novel that unambiguously narrated her opinions on current affairs should not have surprised anyone. More clearly than any others, her novels on the economic crisis and the pandemic revealed just how closely connected novel writing and opinion writing for her really were.

Chapter 6

Literary Populism

Few readers who picked up a copy of Fernando Aramburu’s novel Patria in early September 2016 would have remembered the impassioned op-ed he wrote for El País on the Basque conflict five years before. Titled “Peace in the Basque Country,” the op-ed was prompted by a recent permanent ceasefire declaration by ETA, the armed Basque nationalist group that had riddled Spain with terrorist attacks since the late 1960s. The armed group’s 2011 ceasefire put an end to a campaign of more than forty years of bombings, assassinations, bank robberies, kidnappings, social intimidation, public graffiti, surrogates in political parties, the extraction of a “revolutionary tax” from businesses, and other tactics to advance the cause of Basque independence. Between 1968 and 2011, the group had claimed approximately 830 lives, injured roughly 2,500 people, and kidnapped nearly another eighty.1 In the five decades of violent conflict between ETA and the Spanish state, ceasefire declarations were a dime a dozen. Given all the violence and destruction it had wrought, argued Aramburu in the op-ed, ETA ought to publicly ask for forgiveness. Aramburu’s piece challenged those who called for Spanish society to turn the page on decades of violence. Indeed, the country’s recent history suggested that forgetting would not work. On October 15, 1977, not yet two years after the death of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, the Spanish parliament approved an amnesty law that guaranteed impunity for crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Franco regime (1939–1975). These crimes included the murder 193

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of half a million people during the civil war; the execution, starvation, or fatal infection of 200,000 political prisoners; and the brutal repression over four decades of several hundreds of thousands of people in Francoist prisons, which included everything from forced labor to torture.2 Spain’s amnesty law from 1977 is known colloquially as the “pact of forgetting.”3 It made moving on from the country’s violent past a legal requirement, prioritizing political expediency over any effort to heal the nation’s deep societal wounds. In practice, the law not only forced the state to move on; it also forbade the legal branch of the state from opening even the most tangential investigations into the country’s past criminality.4 Aramburu’s piece on the ceasefire follows a standard op-ed formula. It begins with what is often called the “lede,” an initial image or idea meant to hook the reader. Aramburu’s lede is bold: “ETA does not kill,” we read, before quickly realizing the sarcasm of the statement. From there, it moves to a nut graf, a paragraph that contextualizes or explains the problem that will be addressed. Then comes the central claim: in Aramburu’s case, that a permanent ceasefire is not enough to create lasting peace in the Basque Country, and ETA ought to publicly ask all Spaniards for forgiveness. Finally, it ends with a “kicker,” or poignant upshot. Aramburu’s is counterintuitive yet affecting: “There are a number of ETA prisoners who are also ETA victims,” he writes.5 Aramburu’s op-ed also contains another crucial device: in journalistic jargon, the to-be-sure graf. The to-be-sure graf is the part of the op-ed where the author acknowledges possible counterarguments. In Aramburu’s case, the counterarguments he briefly addresses come from the abertzale left, or left-wing Basque nationalists, who might disagree with ETA’s pursuit of violence yet, nonetheless, think the way ETA prisoners have been treated contravenes Spanish and international law.6 “If the necessary steps were to be taken,” Aramburu writes, “sooner or later we would have to consider the personal situation, one by one, of those who committed the crimes and were punished for them. But, careful, this would be approximately the twenty-fifth or forty-eighth stage in a long process. Not the first or the second.” Even as he acknowledges the



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other side, Aramburu counters the claim often made by those on the abertzale left that any peace negotiations ought to involve the relocation of incarcerated ETA members to prisons in the Basque Country. In other words, the op-ed gives a nod to the prisoner relocation argument before minimizing its importance, acknowledging the other side without damaging his own argument in the process. The subject of prisoner relocation is then quickly dropped, and Aramburu restates his central claim: had ETA publicly asked for forgiveness, “we, as a society, would have taken another step, like Willy Brandt took his, and we could have looked each other in the face, talked, and perhaps, who knows, opened ourselves bit by bit to the hope of a future embrace.”7 Five years later, Aramburu converted this op-ed into the best-selling and prize-winning novel Patria. The future embrace proposed in the op-ed unfolds in the final scene of the novel: “The encounter took place at the music kiosk. It was a brief embrace. They looked each other in the eye for an instant before separating. Did they say anything? Nothing. They said nothing” (642, 584).8 The two people who embrace are the novel’s matriarchal protagonists, each of whom comes to stand on opposing sides of the Basque conflict: one woman’s son lands in jail for his involvement in ETA, while the other’s husband dies in an ETA attack. Structured retrospectively with the novel’s concluding embrace in mind, Patria uses the interrelated lives of two once-friendly, nowhostile families to advance a political argument. The novel’s conclusion vividly illustrates the argument of the original op-ed: a permanent ceasefire is not enough to mend the deep social wounds caused by ETA. ETA must ask for forgiveness and metaphorically embrace the society it injured and divided. Thanks to its novelization in Patria, the message of Aramburu’s earlier op-ed, which had perhaps reached several thousand readers, now reached hundreds of thousands more. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, Aramburu’s concern with avoiding political dogmatism has shaped his career as a novelist intellectual. As we will see throughout this chapter, his attempts to address these concerns have not always borne fruit. Patria, for instance, doubles down on the idea that structural balance is the key to avoiding

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political dogmatism. But in doing so the novel pushes this logic to its extreme, resulting in an acknowledgment of possible counterarguments that is just as unpersuasive as the one being made in the op-ed. In novels, this attempt to acknowledge the other side of the argument often leads to what I call “literary populism.” Unlike an argument in an op-ed, which can happen abstractly, arguments in novels occur in fictional social settings, with “real people” often serving as the repository of moral worth. In their attempt to depict “real people,” however, populist novels such as Aramburu’s often end up painting society as Manichean and turning social and political questions into highly charged moral assertions—two fundamental features of populist politics. In Aramburu’s Patria, the point of view shifts back and forth between what are ultimately opposing views of the Basque conflict.9 One chapter from one side of the conflict, the next from the opposing side. The novel’s strategy of switching perspectives from chapter to chapter ends up giving relatively equal narrative space to each side of the conflict. The alternating chapter structure, in other words, does the work not only of acknowledging but also of fully incorporating into the novel both sides of the conflict. Nevertheless, despite this formal equality, Aramburu’s novel, like his op-ed, ultimately treats the characters on each side of the conflict unequally. The victim’s family and friends, as we will see, provide a rich and complex perspective on the conflict, especially of how it has wrought emotional damage. Those in the orbit of the perpetrator, by contrast, are stereotyped and underdeveloped. In its attempt to show both sides of the conflict, Patria only meaningfully spends time with one side. Its reductive portrayal also suggests, troublingly, that there are only two sides to the Basque conflict. What begins as a performance of structural balance among differing perspectives becomes, over the course of the novel, a narrative argument that explores only one of many possible perspectives. This chapter examines how Aramburu became one of the most acclaimed novelist intellectuals writing on the Basque conflict. It argues that he did so, in part, because of his concern with bias and objectivity in both his opinion and literary writing. In his opinion writing, this



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concern with objectivity manifested in his repeated attempts to give equal hearing to the views of the abertzale left, from addressing their counterarguments in op-eds to penning an entire article from the perspective of an ETA militant. In Patria, this concern expressed itself in the structural balance of alternating chapters, giving equal time to each side of the conflict. Yet equality is not equity, and Aramburu’s attempts at balance rarely went beyond a superficial level of acknowledgment. More than that, these attempts amount to literary populism, in which compositional balance meant to achieve ideological impartiality covers up for a very one-sided perspective. When situations such as the Basque conflict are said to include only two sides, and one’s sympathies lie with only one of those sides, balance and objectivity can easily slip into a Manichean framework of us versus them. Considering Patria alongside his opinion columns, this chapter makes the case that Aramburu is a novelist intellectual deeply concerned with bias and objectivity—just not his own.

Balancing Perspectives Aramburu’s first op-ed made waves across the Spanish intelligentsia. Ominously titled “¿Por qué matamos?” (Why do we kill?), the piece appeared in El País on February 24, 1998, less than a year and a half after the publication of his debut novel, Fuegos con limón (Lemon fire, 1996).10 The column attempted to explain why ETA had killed so many people during its decades-long campaign to bring independence to the Basque Country. Aramburu’s argument was straightforward: ETA violence was meant to sow fear across Spanish, French, and Basque society, suffocating political alternatives to Basque nationalism. What was less straightforward was why ETA continued its violent campaign. Militants, Aramburu argued, could not stop killing because they themselves were now afraid. “Afraid,” Aramburu writes, “of being in a cell alone with the memory” of killing, and afraid of “the repudiation by comrades” back home.11 Fear, therefore, worked both ways: it was just as much a part of ETA’s strategy to spur political transformation as it would

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be a feature of the group’s inevitable downfall, promoting habits of thought and action that became impossible to overcome.12 The op-ed left its mark less for its argument than for its twist: it was a satire told from the perspective of an ETA militant. It was a peculiar form of satire, though, because it was not meant to be believable. The armed militant who narrates the op-ed comes across as the kind of stereotype of an ETA leader that might make a patriotic, center-left reader of El País feel comfortable and morally vindicated in their assumptions, not challenged by their growing empathy. With this unconvincing satire, however, Aramburu was making a crucial political point: just as the op-ed failed to make sense, so, too, did ETA’s violent campaign. This argument was meant to appeal to readers for whom any underlying political explanation of violence was tantamount to legitimating it.13 Those who recognized that violence often had motives, regardless of whether they could be justified, or that the complexity of violent conflicts cannot be boiled down to simple moral judgments, were not the kind of readers Aramburu had in mind. Aramburu’s column appeared in the middle of one of the most uncertain periods in the history of the Basque conflict. In the summer of 1997, nearly a year before the op-ed appeared, ETA members had kidnapped Miguel Ángel Blanco, a young conservative politician in the Basque Country, and held him hostage for two days before committing one of the group’s most symbolic assassinations, following the Spanish government’s refusal to transfer ETA prisoners to the Basque Country in exchange for his release. As one scholar notes, “Blanco’s death radicalized Spanish conservatism.”14 Just weeks before Aramburu’s op-ed was published, a group of prominent intellectuals, including the future director of the Instituto Cervantes Jon Juaristi and the philosopher and El País columnist Fernando Savater, founded the civic organization Foro Ermua in response to Blanco’s assassination. The civic organization, which identified itself as a group supporting the victims of terrorism, quickly became a hub of center-right and conservative activism, launching the political careers of writers, academics, and journalists such as Edurne Uriarte, Mikel Azurmendi, and Iñaki Ezkerra. Despite



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the political heterogeneity of those who opposed ETA violence, the explicit conservatism of groups such as Foro drowned out the nonconservative voices in the Spanish public sphere. This was helped along by the rise of the conservative Partido Popular, which governed the country from 1996 to 2004 under the leadership of José María Aznar. As the philosopher Eduardo Maura writes, at the turn of the twenty-first century “one could only be on one side or the other, and for those who did not want to be on the side of ETA or on the side of the PP—that is, the majority of society—they were forced into a new version of limbo: equidistance.”15 To be “equidistant,” or falsely equivalent, on the Basque conflict was to be a moral relativist. As Maura and others have noted, the charge was typically leveled against those who did not condemn ETA violence in the way prescribed by the most aggressive counterterrorism policies. In 2005, Savater, one of the founders of Foro, was even censured by the group’s leadership for meeting with then–prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to discuss the peace process in the Basque Country.16 The accusation of false equivalency is weighty: it implies being blind to the suffering caused by bloodletting, failing to identify violence for the evil that it is, and forsaking the victims of violence. It means being on the side of terrorism over democracy, or at least buying into the idea of “algo habrá hecho” (they must have done something). “Equidistance” symbolized everything Aramburu was against. It presented a false equivalence—moral, intellectual, evidentiary—between two opposing views on a particular issue. It showed the consequences of taking the other side too seriously, especially when that side was morally beyond the pale. It was what happened when political dogmatism colored moral reasoning. Patria emerged from Aramburu’s op-eds on the Basque conflict not only in a genetic sense but also intellectually. The novel was a way for Aramburu to show that equidistance and objectivity were not the same. Aramburu could be objective by giving equal time to both sides of the conflict without being equidistant by falsely equating them. The novel centers on the interrelated lives of two families. One family consists of

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Miren, Joxian, and their three children, Gorka, Arantxa, and Joxe Mari; the other, of Bittori and Txato—affectionately called “el Txato”—and their two children, Nerea and Xabier. The story tracks the evolution of the relationship between the two families over the course of three decades, from the 1980s to several months after ETA declared a permanent ceasefire in 2011. Written mostly in free indirect speech with interspersed colloquialisms, deliberate grammatical errors, and Basque words and phrases, the narrative unfolds largely through brief flashbacks, organized nonchronologically over the course of 125 episodic chapters. Many of the flashbacks issue from Miren and Bittori, the two matriarchal figures, who strike up a friendship in the 1970s only to watch it erode over the next several decades to the point of rupture and hostility. The central tension in their relationship involves the extortion and murder of Bittori’s husband, Txato, at the hands of ETA. Miren’s son, Joxe Mari, who joins ETA as a young teenager, is part of the armed cell that carries out Txato’s murder. In the latter stages of the novel, we follow Bittori’s attempts to seek closure by mobilizing various backchannels to reestablish contact with Miren—first through Miren’s daughter Arantxa, then through her imprisoned son Joxe Mari. The reunion finally materializes, culminating with the embrace in the closing scene of the novel. Patria sold more than a million copies in Spain. It swept the country’s top literary prizes and continues to be its most widely read literary novel in decades.17 In the wake of the book’s success, Aramburu began writing a weekly op-ed column in the newspaper El Mundo, opining on all matter of current events, from the election of populist leaders in Argentina to the semicentennial of May 1968. He often returned in his columns to the themes of Patria—the power of the matriarch, the futility of political violence, the rockiness of the peace process—even going so far as to defend his literary treatment of them. Among the novelist intellectuals we have studied, Aramburu came to column writing latest in his career. Unlike Almudena Grandes or Javier Cercas, his unease with moving between the worlds of fiction and nonfiction, the forms of the op-ed and the novel, and the roles of pundit and writer is



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conspicuous.18 After less than two years, he gave up his column to return to full-time novel writing. Then, in 2022, he was hired again, this time by El País. Despite Aramburu’s fickle relationship with column writing, the country’s major publications have constantly sought out his opinion, showing just how quickly he has reached the uppermost stratosphere of writerly celebrity. In Spain, he is perhaps the most prominent example of how a writer can achieve significant stature as both a novelist and an intellectual late in their career. The pursuit of both of these careers has made for a careful balancing act. A Spanish teacher in Germany since his midtwenties, Aramburu’s expertise on the Basque conflict stems from his fiction writing and personal experience, not typical sources of intellectual authority. In fact, critics appreciated Patria first and foremost for its ability to avoid intellectualism of any kind. “Here,” wrote the critic for the literary supplement El Cultural, “are lives that are not a motif, but lives.”19 José María Pozuelo Yvancos, perhaps Spain’s most influential literary critic, echoed this sentiment in the newspaper ABC. “Aramburu,” he wrote, “has avoided that his be a book in which ideas . . . eat away at what’s important.” For Pozuelo Yvancos, the novel’s accomplishment was to turn the Basque conflict into a narrative such that “each articulated idea be embodied, have a face.”20 One reviewer even went so far as to attempt to preclude future readings of Patria as a novel of ideas.21 “This is not a novel of ideas,” the reviewer averred, even though “motifs such as the near anthropological importance of matriarchy in Basque society, the abject concept of due obedience . . . or personal responsibility diluted in the irrational force of a violent group are all present.”22 Aramburu himself participated in this apotropaic ritual. In a public conversation with fellow Basque novelist Ramón Saizarbitoria, Aramburu went out of his way to state his opposition to the novel of ideas. “I have written from beginning to end [about] how ETA violence has an effect on certain people, nine protagonists. . . . I have tried not to be Manichean, not to manipulate the collective history in order to prove a thesis, so that someone plays the role of the bad guy.”23 The attempt to

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get out in front of potential criticism was eerily similar to a point he had made, also unprompted, in an interview shortly after the publication of Patria: “I have not written my novel to demonstrate any kind of thesis, I have limited myself to telling stories.”24 However, of all the book’s critics, perhaps its most famous dissented from the consensus. Mario Vargas Llosa, writing in his column for El País, described the novel as “persuasive.” While the novel “judiciously avoids ideological disquisitions,” he explained, it does not avoid ideology. For Vargas Llosa, Patria outwardly embraced it. “The book,” he wrote, “as unhappy as it is spellbinding, is also a clear taking of position.”25 Vargas Llosa unwittingly pointed to something that was on the minds of many of Aramburu’s fellow Basque writers: that despite the effort by national reviewers to ward off associations with the novel of ideas, that is exactly what Patria was. Shortly after its publication, the Basque writer Inazio Mujika described Patria as “a novel of ideas” whose goal was to “functionalize literature” in the service of a stereotypical view of the Basque conflict.26 Edurne Portela, a Basque writer and columnist for El País, wrote in the prologue of her own book on the conflict that Patria offered “a simplified version of reality for the sake of defending a thesis. Its characters act as though they are guided by this thesis, within a melodramatic narrative that promotes a Manichean and unnuanced version of history.”27 Aramburu challenged these readings, but he had been haunted for some time by anxiety over the perceived political didacticism of his novels.28 “The dangers that surround me are not few and far between,” he told an interviewer for the journal Revista de Occidente following the publication, in 2006, of his short story collection Los peces de la amargura (The fish of bitterness), his first fictional foray into the Basque conflict. Among the dangers Aramburu listed were “pathos, the temptation to take a political stand and fall into morals and reductivism, the inadequate language for the material, etc.”29 By the time he published Patria, his second work of fiction on the Basque conflict, Aramburu was a seasoned op-ed writer. From the late 1990s, he had regularly published op-eds for El País. His pieces mostly



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focused on topics far afield from Spain, such as soccer, literature, and politics in his adoptive country of Germany.30 Yet many of those opinion pieces still addressed, if indirectly, current affairs in Spain.31 On the rare occasions that he did write directly about Spain, it was almost always on cultural topics.32 After being hired to write a weekly column for El Mundo in 2017, which he titled “Entre coche y andén” (Mind the gap), Aramburu’s column writing became at once more and less expansive in the scope of subjects it covered. Aramburu mixed opinion journalism with implicit and explicit references to Patria in his column.33 His prize-winning op-ed titled “Estamos hechos de palabras” (We are made of words) is a case in point. Invoking “tyrants,” “totalitarians,” and “official discourse,” Aramburu implicitly criticized what he saw as the politicization of the Basque language within the Basque Country—a theme at the forefront of Patria.34 This blurring of boundaries between novel writing and column writing was deliberate. “I have proposed,” he said upon the announcement of the weekly column, “to reflect in writing on that narrow space that exists between the convictions of . . . literature and journalism.”35 Fiction’s centrality to Aramburu’s larger persuasive project cannot be overstated. Alongside his opinion journalism, he enlisted Patria in the fight for what he has called the “literary defeat of ETA”: “The more testimonies we are able to contribute, the more difficult it will be for [ETA and its sympathizers] to impose the lie, the myth, the legend. This task is for the contemporaries. The writers of the future will hardly be able to make use of their personal memory, they will have to resort to newspaper archives, asking their grandparents . . . and they won’t always come up with a reliable story.”36 For Aramburu, fiction’s documentary capacity was essential to the genre’s legitimacy as a mode of political engagement. On this, he was in lockstep with Muñoz Molina, Cercas, and other novelist intellectuals. Fiction’s ability to document not only made it sympatico with journalism, but it put the two on par intellectually. Each in their own way provided a first draft of history.

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Literary populism has an extensive yet uncharted history. In Spanish literary history, classic Realist novels such as Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La tribuna (1882) or Benito Pérez Galdós’s Misericordia (1897) have been read as early novelistic appropriations of ideas from populist, workingclass movements.37 Scholars of Latin American literature have used populism to theorize an Argentine “populist scene” in which literary and other cultural forms are implicated in a “permanent struggle to define political identities (fundamentally that of ‘the people’),” or to explain how best-selling Realist novelists “speak to, for, and as the people” through “narrative acoustics.”38 Scholars of English literature have used populism to describe the fraught “passage from mystical to social democracy” in Howards End or the way the narrator speaks “on the part of the mob” in Bleak House.39 In “blending . . . the vernacular and intellectualism,” modernist writers such as James Joyce are said to have employed “strategic populism”; a century earlier, “populist tendencies” are felt coursing through Romanticism in the thirty years following the French Revolution.40 Yet José Carlos Mariátegui, the early twentieth-century Peruvian writer and political philosopher, was perhaps the first to see literary populism for what it was. In 1930, Mariátegui wrote an essay titled “Populismo literario y estabilización capitalista” (Literary populism and capitalist stabilization) for Amauta, the Marxist cultural and literary journal he founded in 1924. The essay was responding to a recent literary movement in France that went by the name of “populism,” which had coalesced around the Manifeste du roman populiste, written by León Lemonnier and published in 1929. The new movement saw itself as revolutionary, calling out the French literary establishment for its snobbery, aestheticism, and bourgeois-centered subjects. In the manifesto, the signatories argued that literature should primarily represent the humble lives of “the people,” which included peasants, the working class, and the middle class.41 Mariátegui saw through the rhetoric. Literary populism, he argued, “proclaims its own agnosticism, its own political neutrality. It pretends



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to coincide with the realism and objectivity of . . . revolutionary literature.”42 But rather than develop a new aesthetic form, the populist literary movement, he argued, harkened back to characteristics that had been central to earlier generations of writers, only managing “to approximate the spirit of small-business owners.”43 It did not, in other words, concern itself with the employees of small businesses, the servants of the wealthy, or workers of industrial factories. Its version of “the people” was dramatically skewed, representing only a narrow slice of society. Attempting to position itself “at an equal distance between ultradecadent aestheticism and nihilist . . . desperation,” the movement was mostly concerned with the history of literature rather than the history of those it represented.44 Literary populism, from Mariátegui’s point of view, was in no way “an honest return to objectivity,” but rather “essentially demagogic.”45 Pretentions toward objectivity, claims of political neutrality, and partiality toward the ethos of small-business owners were, for Mariátegui, the true colors of this erstwhile French movement. These characteristics resonate with what literary populism has become in Spain today. Beginning in the 1990s, novelist intellectuals such as Juan Manuel de Prada and Arturo Pérez-Reverte initiated what some scholars have called “the renationalization of Spanish narrative,” which was “characterized by the defense of an unquestionable democratic normalcy, which brought with it a notable ideologically conservative turn.”46 This renationalization was two-pronged: novels such as De Prada’s Las máscaras del héroe (The hero’s masks, 1996) epitomized the aesthetic recovery of Francoist or fascist-sympathetic writers, while others such as Pérez-Reverte’s La sombra del águila (The shadow of the eagle, 1993) carved a path for the literary call for national unity through the celebration of historical events, such as the Peninsular War against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.47 Having emerged from the transition to democracy, with the twin celebrations of the quincentenary of Columbus’s 1492 voyage and the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain was having a nationalist moment. Another would come several decades later, but for less celebratory reasons.

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Patria appeared at a critical moment in Spain’s post-Franco history. Amid the rise of Catalan pro-independence sentiment and the breakdown of two-party dominance in Spanish politics, Aramburu’s novel, together with celebrated works of nonfiction such as María Elvira Roca Barea’s best-selling popular history Imperiofobia y leyenda negra (2016), contributed to renationalizing Spanish unity.48 For many critics, what the novel brought to the table was new and necessary. In the words of one critic, the book “gives voice to those who have never had it, the victims.”49 In the words of another, Aramburu “has done what no one until now had dared to do: write a novel about the victims without political maneuvering or reservation.”50 Such claims, however, are suspect at best, not least because they betray a partial view of who counts as a victim in the Basque conflict.51 Moreover, dozens of novels have been published about the conflict’s victims, just not in Spanish. Many Basque novels depicting victims of violence by ETA or state counterterrorist units have never been translated into Spanish, which means their readership is limited to the roughly 800,000 people who are fluent or native Basque speakers.52 Despite the appearance of Basque words and phrases in the novel, Aramburu himself does not read, write, or speak Basque; Patria is written in Spanish and was published by the Barcelona-based, primarily Spanish-language publishing house Tusquets. Despite the celebratory claims of critics, the novel’s purview extends far beyond representing the suffering of victims alone. Indeed, half of the novel tells the story of the perpetrators, as well as those sympathetic to or passive toward ETA violence. As described earlier, the structure of Patria signals a commitment to understanding both sides of the conflict. Fast-paced chapters create an almost symmetric narrative balance that gives equal space to the points of view of perpetrator and victim, shifting between the families and others in their social orbit. Sometimes, this view shifts from chapter to chapter; most often, it changes every few chapters, without warning.



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The novel’s alternating narrative is composed of a diverse set of voices. Some speak unequivocally from the side of ETA’s victims, including Bittori, one of the two matriarchs and wife of the victim, as well as her two children, Nerea and Xabier. Several characters not born in the Basque Country, often described using the xenophobic Basque term maqueto (173, 254), also fall on the victim side.53 From those on the opposite side, that of sympathy or passivity toward ETA violence, we hear from the imprisoned ETA member Joxe Mari, as well as his mother, Miren, whom we are told “became fanaticized out of maternal instinct” (69, 55). We also hear from numerous townspeople sympathetic to the cause, including, most notably, a priest named Don Serapio. Still other voices shift from one side of the conflict to the other, such as Joxe Mari’s sister, Arantxa, or have become depoliticized, such as Joxe Mari’s brother, Gorka. The novel’s architecture appears deliberately even-handed. Its skillful combination of sequence, organization, and rhythm works to eschew any claim of political imbalance. This even-handedness satisfies a nagging desire for argumentative objectivity. Yet it also mirrors the broader architecture of literary populism, which is organized around three specific features. The first is the claim to depict “real people” instead of elites, which are characterized as corrupt. These real people are drawn in a number of ways, though they are, in the end, relational rather than absolute. In the case of Patria, real people amount to the businessowning middle class of small-town Gipuzkoa, the Basque region home to San Sebastián, where the novel is set. Foregrounding a particular version of real people sets up what the novel will come to define as “the establishment,” understood in Patria to be everyone who promotes the ETA-sympathetic status quo. These argumentative moves are typical of populist rhetoric. However, Aramburu’s invocations of real people are troubling for another reason. Not only do they not represent Basque society, demographically or otherwise, but they are also antipluralist in that they deny the legitimacy of any other group to claim to be “real.” The novel never meaningfully contests this homogeneity nor the question of who counts as “the people.”

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The second defining feature of literary populism is turning political questions into moral ones. As the historian Federico Finchelstein writes, populist leaders throughout history have “transformed political arguments into all or nothing fights for a new moral order.”54 This transformation evinces what the political theorist Jan-Werner Müller calls “a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified . . . people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.”55 Like the synecdoche of “real people,” the conversion of political claims into moral ones is similarly antipluralistic. It splits politics into two opposing camps and stacks the deck in favor of one while often misrepresenting the other. Moreover, when confronted with new political claims, the populist approach can only fold them into “good” or “bad” camps, with few, if any, shades of gray. Under the auspices of populism, morality is a powerful form of rhetoric that packages arguments simplistically, but effectively. The moral simplicity provides fast access for our emotions, quickly mobilizing constituencies around particular views. Moral arguments that have been transformed from political ones also lay the groundwork for a broader vision of society. This broader vision is a Manichean one, the third and final feature of literary populism. Literary populism codes characters as “real people,” and “real people” as morally good. The shift in description from characters to “real people” to “good” simplifies the moral universe of the novel into a dualistic vision of society. In such a moral universe, bad characters who wish to occasion any profound moral transformation remain at the mercy of their good counterparts, not their own free will. So, who are the “real people” in Patria? As in Aramburu’s only other novel on the Basque conflict, Años lentos (2012), the protagonist of Patria is a small-business owner.56 The owner of a local trucking company, Txato is reasonable, understanding, and fair—unlike his employees. “El Txato,” we are told, “had once tried to fire [a] scumbag, who was a mediocre mechanic, and also lazy. [The man] ripped up the letter of dismissal without even bothering to read it. Hours later he returned accompanied by two individuals who identified themselves as members of the [Basque



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left-wing nationalist] LAB trade union. The threats reached such a point that el Txato had no choice but to reinstate that swine whose mere presence made his blood boil” (215, 192). In the contest between scumbaggery, mediocrity, and laziness, on the one hand, and patience, responsibility, and humility on the other, the latter will always win over the reader. But notice how the passage describes the central tension between Txato and his mechanic. We are told that Txato’s employee is mediocre and lazy. But no actions by the mechanic are proffered as evidence to support such assertions. Even if they were, mediocrity and laziness in a modern social democracy such as Spain’s cannot alone break a labor contract. Personal observations in themselves are not legitimate grounds for dismissal. By firing his employee for personal reasons, Txato has likely violated a union-negotiated contract, which stipulates the terms for despedido disciplinario (disciplinary dismissal) and despedido improcedente (unfair dismissal). The novel, however, does not present the situation in this way. We are instead asked to constellate a number of characteristics, from which we are to assume just cause: mediocrity, laziness, the “hoop in his ear” (214, 191), the “labor union patch on his overalls” (153, 134). The employee, Txato tells us, is “a really bad person” (219, 196). Instead of a legal situation involving a labor dispute, readers are treated to a moralistic tale in which Txato represents the honorable individual while the mechanic represents the horror of the collective. Labor unions, labor laws, and other kinds of worker protection prevent this collective from being held accountable. In the world of the novel, the small-business owner has no recourse against such collective power. Unlike his employee, Txato apparently has no group he can turn to in order to enforce his benevolent will. Despite the selfevident virtue of Txato, the novel’s moralistic description of the relationship between employees and management only illustrates the desires of one narrow slice of “the people”—namely, business owners. Yet readers are warned not to interpret Txato’s actions in class terms. As Txato’s son, Xabier, reminds him, “Look, aita, if you’re a business owner you can’t mix with the working class. I’m not a

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classist, but what do you want me to say? Any guy who doesn’t like you or envies you is going to try to hurt you. He doesn’t even have to try, since you’re always around” (219, 196). The category of class, throughout the novel, is dismissed as an inadequate lens through which to explain the atmosphere of aggression, resentment, and unfairness that distinguishes Txato from his employees. Rather than a class-based account, the novel feeds us a moral account of labor conflicts that might presumably play better with readers. The novel taps into the reader’s emotional reserves, and through its simplified and depoliticized account of labor relations, channels those feelings only toward one side and one moral outcome. People behave honorably or dishonorably rather than legally or illegally, and no one suspects that the kinds of labor practices that go on in Txato’s trucking business might be unlawful. “Tell me the truth. Do I look like someone who exploits people?” Txato implores. “All my life I’ve done nothing but work like a mule and create jobs. Right now, I have fourteen employees on the payroll. What do I do? Move the business to Logroño and leave them stranded without wages, without insurance, without shit?” (60, 46). The crescendo of rhetorical questions tells us that Txato is everything his workers are not: hard-working, kind, and, most important of all, politically independent. Txato is not only the manager of the company but also its owner. Unlike his workers, he receives double compensation: he is paid for his managerial labor and reaps the company’s profits. The novel, however, collapses this fundamental distinction between manager and owner, presenting him as a benevolent force who gives his workers the gifts of employment, insurance, and wages, and his community the gifts of jobs, stability, and longevity. Company profits do not figure into this picture. In addition to erasing any trace of profits, the novel inflates the social value of the company, coding as a significant moral good the fourteen jobs Txato has created with his trucking business, an outsized contribution by one person to small-town Gipuzkoa. To readers, the creation of these jobs feels not only noble but perhaps the most economic good a single individual can possibly do. However, in the employment



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statistics of Gipuzkoa, not to mention the Basque Country or Spain, fourteen jobs amounts to a rounding error at best. If entrepreneurs are capable of heroism, workers, by contrast, only appear to be capable of economic stagnation. Labor unions, or workers organizing with other workers, are the main culprit. In scenes such as the one between Txato and his union-backed worker, the novel argues that labor unions engage in seedy forms of collective action, cover up and foster poor performance, and lack political independence. This makes it easy for Txato, and readers, to dismiss labor unions as legitimate political actors. We witness this dismissal most strikingly of all when Txato describes union officials with phrases and terms that range from skeptical—“who identified themselves as”—to insulting—“thugs” (153, 134). Such descriptions never apply to small-business owners, whose failings only ever appear, if they do at all, between the lines. The unimpeachable benevolence of small-business owners would be news to many of their workers. In Spain, as in the United States and elsewhere, labor violations involving workplace harassment don’t primarily occur in large multinational corporations but rather in small and medium-size businesses, such as Txato’s.57 This may sound surprising, but there is a logic to it: unless workers in small businesses are part of a labor union, intimate forms of management often lead to coercive forms of exploitation, such as odd hours, uncompensated favors, last-minute requests, poor workspace conditions, and management surveillance. To this, one might add the fact that, on average, nonunionized workers in small businesses also receive lower pay, fewer benefits, and fewer labor protections than do their big-business counterparts.58 Yet this reality contrasts dramatically with the experience of labor practices in the novel. Though the novel gives voice to an array of characters with differing perspectives, it fails to lend credence to the view of workers. That workers don’t count as “real people” in the novel delegitimates and morally ostracizes the most numerous class of citizens in the Basque Country. Txato’s moralization of worker-management relations is important for one further reason: it allows the novel to ignore the political ideas of

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left-wing Basque nationalism. The novel claims through suggestion, speculation, and atmosphere that labor unions in the Basque Country lack political independence. This is because “political independence,” in the context of the novel, is a moral rather than empirical category. Because of this moral valence, the claim avoids having its truth-value scrutinized. Readers are dissuaded from stopping to ask whether it is, in fact, true that labor unions in the Basque Country lacked political independence from the 1980s to the early 2010s. Yet in the context of the novel, this claim wields extraordinary power. Perhaps most importantly, it cuts off inquiry into the motivations behind support for abertzale ideas, effectively labeling an entire current of political thought as beyond the pale. Consider, for instance, how the novel presents a left-wing political rally in Gipuzkoa. One night in their bedroom, the two brothers, Joxe Mari and Gorka, talk about a protest in town that will take place the next day. “You’d be better putting down those novels and joining the struggle for the liberation of Euskal Herria,” Joxe Mari tells Gorka. “Tomorrow there’s a protest at seven. I expect you to be there. Some of my friends have been asking me what you’ve been up to. While those from your group show up, no one ever sees you. What am I supposed to tell them? No, it’s just that he’s gone soft and spends the whole day reading. Tomorrow at seven I want to see you in the plaza” (183, 161). Canned, clichéd, and wordy, Joxe Mari’s political utterance—“joining the struggle for the liberation of Euskal Herria”—is devoid of meaning. We sympathize with Gorka when he shrugs off his brother’s empty demand. Gorka and Joxe Mari are fourteen and seventeen years old, respectively. They aren’t too young to be able to entertain or express political ideas. Nevertheless, the novel infantilizes them. Even if, in the interest of realism, the novel had decided to boil politics down to an adolescent vocabulary, its narrative style of free indirect speech provides ample opportunity to move beyond the linguistic, rational, and expressive capabilities of teenagers. From the perspective of the reader, the novel’s otherwise fluid, alluring, and entertaining style of writing all of a sudden, upon turning to political issues, becomes stilted and not credible.



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That the politics behind the protests go unexplored does not help the novel’s persuasive aims. As the bedtime conversation between the two brothers suggests, political participation in the novel results from peer pressure rather than ideological conviction. This does not square, however, with the social experience of protest in the Basque Country during the same period. ETA’s political strategy involved illegal acts of violence, certainly, but also the advocacy of legal and legitimate aims shared by a broad spectrum of Basque society: relocating Basque prisoners to the Basque Country, legalizing abertzale political parties and media, self-determination, and rethinking of Spain’s quasi-federal status, among others.59 Basque society mobilized through strikes, protests, and demonstrations in order to advance these aims. In the novel, however, few ideas are ever attached to mobilizations of this kind, and fewer still are explored in any detail. One of the several instances in which such demands are specified is when Joxe Mari himself, in fact, becomes the subject of a protest concerning the return of ETA prisoners to local jails in the Basque Country (620, 564). Mostly, however, political activity is determined by the prepolitical tug of kinship or friendship. The move to circumscribe protest activity to the pressures of friends and family may seem like a truism. But it further contributes to the novel’s Manichean division of social space, with friends and family on one side and everyone else on the other. Meanwhile, the moral ostracism of abertzale politics remains apace. This same conversion of political decisions into moral ones governs the novel’s depiction of Basque youth joining ETA. In the novel, although we simply assume that Joxe Mari has been politically radicalized, there is scant evidence to support it. The most detailed explanation for his political transformation comes from Gorka, who tells us that Joxe Mari joined ETA following the death of Mikel Zabalza and the example of his friends. A real historical figure, Zabalza was a young bus driver from the village of Orbaitzeta, in Navarre, who was taken into custody by the Guardia Civil and whose tortured body appeared in the Bidasoa river on December 15, 1985. “Gorka remembered that his brother came home in a frenzy. He didn’t have the slightest doubt—and

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neither did his friends—that the bus driver had died in the Intxaurrondo barracks where they tortured him.” The backstory continues: “Gorka noticed in his words and obscenities a furious desire to destroy, to take revenge, to harm, really harm. Whom? Who cares, to harm however and wherever” (242, 218). In response to Zabalza’s death, protests leading to a general strike took place across the Basque Country, and Spanish readers might picture Joxe Mari and many of the story’s characters participating in them.60 Joxe Mari’s fury is thus palpable but not unreasonable. Even today, many people in the Basque Country and elsewhere in Spain would be moved to anger by the mention of Zabalza’s murder. Yet in the novel, the scene is made cartoonish, not only by the unimaginative description of that fury but also by the free indirect speech used to communicate it. Joxe Mari’s response to Zabalza’s murder has nothing to do with politics. It is born from cultural and communal commitments that are said to be more primal than politics. From Gorka’s perspective, politics is when “you notice with a kind of nice tingling feeling that you have contracted the fever everyone else has and that unites them in a fever for the cause” (242, 217). This is what we are told happened to Joxe Mari: fever for a cause. Within a social atmosphere of bad influences, destructive friendships, and peer pressure, Joxe Mari’s supposed political radicalization seems preordained well before Zabalza’s murder. Behind Joxe Mari’s fury, however, one would be hard-pressed to find any ideas. What might the murder reveal about Spanish state security forces? What broader political, economic, and historical trends does the murder represent? What made this murder so socially and emotionally explosive for people of such different ideological persuasions across the Basque Country? The novel gives no answers to these kinds of questions. Instead, ignoring decades of scholarly research and journalistic reporting, Patria portrays Basque citizens as thinking ETA has no political principles, no claims of grievance, and no unique vision of society.61 The decision to not represent ETA’s political claims, regardless of how objectionable they may be, is itself a political claim. Combined with others the novel makes, such as equating “the people” with small-business



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6.1  Front page of the Basque newspaper Egin on December 16, 1985, following the discovery of the body of Miguel Zabalza. Biblioteca Nacional de España.

owners, Patria’s taking of political positions undermines its own pretense of narrative objectivity. It may seem eminently reasonable to cordon off certain ideas advanced by ETA, such as the principle that nonstate actors should turn to violence to achieve political goals; but many more ideas ETA has advanced have also been supported by academic scholarship, journalistic investigation, and legitimate

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political actors belonging to political parties of varying ideological stripes in the Basque and Spanish parliaments. In more than 600 pages, Patria addresses only one challenge to its political position in any detail. In this way, it most mirrors the 2011 op-ed from which it was born. Late in the novel, the Guardia Civil tortures Joxe Mari in a scene meant to evoke the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (Antiterrorist liberation groups, GAL), covert death squads used by the Spanish state to fight ETA during the 1980s. Joxe Mari is beaten up for “two, three hours” (506, 462), not allowed to eat or sleep, strangled several times with a plastic bag, and shocked with “electrodes on his legs, on his testicles, and behind his ears” (509, 464). He is also, we learn, forced to hold a gun so that he can later be framed for a murder. The scene reconstructing the torture is violent and affecting. Yet just as we think the novel may become self-critical, the book folds this scene into its moralistic imagination of politics, identifying torture, rather than the Spanish state or any of its actors, as the source of moral perversion. It is easy to cast torture as a moral evil with little thought as to who is committing it, who is suffering it, and why it is occurring at all. Condemning torture wholesale requires no struggle with ethical dilemmas, political challenges, or self-reflection. It is an objection on principle that is not so much argued as stated. It is easy to say that torturing one’s political adversaries is wrong; it is much harder to say that their political ideas deserve a hearing. Although political ideas do not factor into the novel’s concerns, the feeling of what it was like to live through a climate of ideological homogeneity does. This is one of the main themes of the novel. Readers witness political opinions that stray from support for Basque nationalism being socially censured and controlled through the threat of violence. The novel especially takes aim at the trope “algo habrá hecho” (they must have done something), used by some Basque nationalists to dismiss ETA assassinations by assuming that all of the group’s victims are targeted for legitimate reasons.62 The case of Txato’s murder challenges the assumption that ETA does not kill indiscriminately. Yet, in Aramburu’s narrativization of this critique, the novel reproduces the same



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uncritical logic in its treatment of ETA. By ignoring the differences between legitimate and illegitimate political ideas, the novel invariably views the abertzale left in the same way populists view the “corrupt establishment”: as an opposition to be dismissed rather than a legitimate political opponent whose ideas are worth dismantling. Patria’s deliberate avoidance of political ideas makes it conspicuous among cultural representations of the Basque conflict. Both inside and outside of Spain, writers, filmmakers, and other artists have seen abertzale and other political ideas as fundamental to understanding the violent conflict. In the words of the writer and columnist Edurne Portela, since the publication of Ramón Saizarbitoria’s 100 metro in 1976, Basque literature has managed to “underline the complexity of the conflict and situate the reader or viewer in zones of ambiguity that may turn out to be uncomfortable.”63 International filmmakers such as Gillo Pontecorvo and best-selling writers such as Mark Kurlansky have similarly explored the intellectual roots of this violence.64 Patria, however, draws a veil over ideas it finds objectionable, falling back on the stereotype of political radicalism as a set of cultural and prepolitical commitments rather than ideological ones. Within the social framework of the novel, what one thinks of the Basque conflict has more to do with who one associates with than what political ideas one supports.65 By treating politics as a matter of personal relationships, the novel excludes a broad ideological tent that includes, among other groups, those who support as well as those who reject ETA’s use of violence—even as the Spanish political system has moved beyond its banning of political parties and newspapers. In true op-ed fashion, Patria has carved out its own space in contemporary literature by going against the grain of popular opinion. Yet it fails the test of fairly acknowledging the other side, of providing a thorough to-be-sure graf. Instead of earnestly entertaining alternative views, the novel folds these perspectives into its Manichean division of society, moralistic view of politics, and reductive idea of “real people.” As a result, the formal effort to give equal space to each side is not coupled with any genuine attempt to understand the other side, a coupling

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6.2  Scene from Gillo Pontecorvo’s Ogro (1979) re-creating ETA’s assassination of Francoappointed Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco on December 20, 1973. Album / Alamy Stock Photo.

that might have helped substantiate the novel’s narrative pretentions toward equality.

Moral Extremes Let us return, for a moment, to one of the pillars of populist theory: the moral imagination of politics. Many of the novel’s characters who are sympathetic to Basque independence share exaggerated moral failings or, as one scholar puts it, “a number of deeply unattractive personality traits.”66 Miren, the mother of the ETA militant, is overbearing, matriarchal, and controlling; Joxian, her husband, is anti-intellectual, detached,



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and acquiescent. Don Serapio, the pro-independence priest who evokes the historical figure of the San Sebastián bishop José María Setién, is “handsy” (79, 64) and likely a sex offender. These character traits have not simply been randomly assigned. Many of these attributes recall those ascribed to the rebellious masses in the classic texts of early twentieth-century crowd psychology by the likes of José Ortega y Gasset, Gustave Le Bon, and Sigmund Freud. As with these accounts of the masses, irrationality forms the bedrock of Patria’s depiction of Basque nationalists. This assumption of irrationality, which in the novel generates a suspicious political cohesion among such contrasting social figures as a Catholic priest and a bar owner, goes entirely unexamined. Nowhere is the problematic marriage of irrationalism and personal moral failing more on display than in the relationship between Joxe Mari and his brother, Gorka. As is already apparent in the scene about attending a protest, Joxe Mari and Gorka are opposites in every way. “They grew, Gorka in height, Joxe Mari in width. They shared a last name and that’s about it” (184, 162). Gorka is “skinny, fragile”; after puberty, he grew but walked hunched over (174, 153). Joxe Mari was the “tallest and stockiest” (167, 146) of his ETA cell, having grown from a “healthy boy, strong, big eater” into a “tall and broad young man” (42, 29). Gorka is gay; Joxe Mari is straight. When Joxe Mari learns that Gorka is living with his partner, Ramuntxo, in Bilbao, he decides to confront him. “Well,” he yells, “I am embarrassed of having a faggot brother who doesn’t give a shit about dragging our family name through the mud” (582, 530). While Gorka “read beautifully, expressed himself fluently, had a great command of the [Basque] language and, on top of it, a great voice” (360, 329), Joxe Mari and his friends “spoke what they spoke, that is, colloquial euskera and street euskera lightly improved by schooling” (186, 163–164). The central tension driving these dichotomies, however, is intellectual. We are told that, “regarding intellectual matters, Gorka was very superior to his brother” (185, 163). When Gorka hangs a picture of the poet Antonio Machado on the wall of their shared bedroom, Joxe Mari

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responds by uttering a poem of his own: “Oh poet, / Your verses fill the halls, / Please unzip my fly / and massage my balls” (185, 162–163). Gorka’s intellectualism causes his parents to believe their son has “contracted a fever for reading” (180, 158). Though the metaphor is apt, Gorka’s parents assume this quite literally, treating him as though he has an incurable illness. The only person who appears to understand Gorka at all is his sister, Arantxa. Arantxa is, in fact, the one who had cultivated Gorka’s interest in reading by gifting him books from a young age. She did the same, we are told, with Joxe Mari. But Joxe Mari never developed an interest in reading. Cast as the even-keeled figure whose job it is to mend the family’s interpersonal relationships, Arantxa, we later find out, is the one who restores contact between both families after Txato’s murder. Part reader of books, part reader of people, Arantxa is the only one capable of brokering reconciliation, symbolically, between ETA and its victims. Instead of being agents of their own actions, Gorka and Joxe Mari had their respective fates sealed early on. Arantxa’s ecumenical book gifting enacts Patria’s formalization of narrative balance. Each brother had an equal opportunity to pursue a life of the mind, to develop intellectual—and, by extension, political—independence, and to value such things as literature and culture. (These values, one cannot help but notice, might also be ones the author holds quite deeply.) Yet only Gorka chooses to pursue an intellectual path, and we never quite understand why. As an explanation, readers are only provided with vague character traits, such as when we learn from Gorka’s parents that he was “a weird kid” (180, 158). The dynamic between Gorka and Joxe Mari appears tailor-made to refute the argument that the Spanish state systematically suppresses the Basque language. It also challenges the idea that Basque nationalists truly care about their language, culture, and history. Through the figure of Gorka, Patria attempts to convince readers that the opposite, in fact, is true. Through Gorka, the novel makes its most direct political claim: that practically all Basque writers who write in Basque (as opposed to Spanish) are morally compromised, because their work is supported



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financially by the Basque government. Among the seventeen autonomous communities that make up Spain’s quasi-federal political system, the Basque Country indeed enjoys arguably the most autonomy, especially over cultural, linguistic, and fiscal matters.67 Thanks to its fiscal autonomy, the Basque government continuously promotes Basque-language writing, primarily through literary prizes, literary festivals, publishing houses, radio and television stations, and lecture circuits. The novel harps on this, arguing that writers write in Basque in order to make a living from Basque government subsidies of Basque-language writing. But it goes one step further, claiming that, in pursuing these Basque-language opportunities, writers sacrifice their intellectual and political independence, because these subsidies come with the ideological strings of Basque nationalism attached. (With one brief exception, the Basque Country has always been governed by the center-right Basque nationalist party PNV.) In the novel, it is this Basque-language cultural milieu that most attracts Gorka. After he distances himself from ETA’s politics, he begins to work for a Basque radio station in Bilbao (253, 228), and, as we learn, “Basque became his primary source of income” (359, 327). Although the novel indicts the hypocrisy of those who, like Joxe Mari, proclaim Basque nationalism yet seem not to care about its language, history, or culture, it also does not spare those who, like Gorka, make their living from language and culture thanks to the nationalist policies of the Basque government. In public, Aramburu has repeatedly portrayed Basque writers as morally compromised. During an interview at the 2011 Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico, he was asked, “You have said that Basque writers are not free. Why?” They aren’t because they are financed, they are part of the campaign to promote the [Basque] language. In the Basque Country, the fiction that there exist readers in euskera is maintained and, therefore, official support is necessary. Subsidies are a double-edged sword: they allow you to be a writer, but you know that if you veer off course you will lose a piece of the pie. I have great affection for [the Basque writer] Bernardo Atxaga, he’s a

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great person, but he has addressed the topic of ETA in a metaphorical way, without stating the obvious: suffering and blood. He is not a free man.68

Although Aramburu later apologized for these remarks, his criticism, as we have seen, would appear again, years later, under the protection of Patria’s fiction. As one critic has written, Aramburu’s folding of criticism of Basque-language policy within his fiction shows the extent to which he is willing to put his own literature “at the service of . . . a form of ideological positioning.”69 Furthermore, Aramburu has implied that, unlike his own learning of Spanish, the Basque language for many Basques is not earned through study, dedication, or hard work but instead simply absorbed, often poorly, as in the case of colloquial and street euskera.70 Even when issuing perhaps his most direct political claim, Aramburu cannot escape the orbit of the novel’s Manichean moralizing. There is one scene in the novel that, better than any other, encapsulates Patria’s literary populism. In it, Nerea, the daughter of Txato and Bittori, appears to anchor her political views in a combination of traditional social roles, peer pressure, and the inexplicable feeling of certain words: Nerea loved that motto that spread mouth to mouth, that could be read in so many places: Happy, Combative Youth. And—happy, combative, and young—she voted for Herri Batasuna. She couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Certainly, she liked the idea of joy more than the idea of combat. Throwing rocks, setting fires, crashing cars? That was for the boys. That’s what she and her friends thought. . . . They did go to mass meetings and demonstrations. But in the village pretty much all of the young people took part in them. Even the children of maquetos as well, of course, as those of the mayor, who was from the PNV [Basque Nationalist Party]. One of them studied with Nerea and, together with other students, they unfurled banners, put up posters, and distributed pamphlets or graffitied the walls of the school. (254, 229)71

The novel portrays the moral toxicity of rural life in the Basque Country as so penetrating and unsuspecting that, at one point, it shapes the views of the family victimized by ETA. We witness in particular how the self-regulating environment of the town keeps teenagers politically



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in line. Everyone supports Basque nationalism, and such support even cuts across ideological lines. Moreover, supporting abertzale politics, in this case represented by the left-wing political party Herri Batasuna, becomes an act of rebellion, retrofitted for a new generation of excited young adults. As Nerea explains, no longer must her generation choose between rebellion and happiness. They can have both, each with its own pliable definition that can accommodate any number of innocent, adolescent desires. Yet political excitement also stymies the imagination. Nerea “couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” she explains, and suddenly felt a compulsive need to follow whatever “her friends thought.” As the novel makes clear, however, words alone do not stymie the imagination. Only words that are combined with collective action do. Such is the frenzied, thoughtless mass psychology of the protest, which, inexplicably, brings together people as politically opposed as maquetos— the xenophobic term for non-Basques who typically support Spanish nationalism—and the center-right Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). In the novel, both groups come together over the question of ETA prisoners in the rabid environment of small-town Gipuzkoa. Perhaps, it is implied, political unity occurs because there is no room for dissent. Arantxa’s claim brings us full circle to journalism. In the Basque Country, the novel argues, journalism abandoned its mandate to report the truth long ago. The void left behind is one only literary writers, such as Aramburu, can fill. If journalists will not report the truth, then the responsibility falls to novelists—ideally, ones who are also outsiders in some meaningful sense, certainly not relying on support from the Basque government. As a novel by a writer who has not lived in the Basque Country since the 1980s and claims to tell the truth other Basque writers cannot or will not tell, Patria is perfectly positioned to satisfy all these criteria. It is journalism by other means.

Stirring Political Feelings Not every novel that claims to depict “the people,” converts political claims into moral assertions, or offers a Manichean framework for

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understanding society is populist. However, when these fundamental aspects of populism are brought together, their mixture is the narratively potent brew I have described as literary populism. This literary mode distinguishes itself from others that trade in these aspects by marshaling them together in the service of antipluralism. Only certain people count as real people. Only these particular people can speak moral truths. They are your friends; everyone else is an enemy. Populist novels such as Patria echo this thinking through and through. Antipluralism is ultimately why Patria fails to be a persuasive op-ed novel. Rather than use journalistic balance to inspire an earnest engagement with a range of perspectives on the Basque conflict, Aramburu’s novel uses the technique like a blunt instrument to promote one political view. The novel then turns the political view it has chosen into a moral one, using it to divide its literary world into factions of good versus evil. Both sides of the divide, however, really only represent one side. The version of formal narrative balance we encounter is nothing more than an unpersuasive form of acknowledging the other side of the argument, which may be useful for checking boxes but proves useless for narrating conflict. Reconstructing only one side of the Basque conflict forecloses moral, ideological, and even emotional complexity. By the end of the novel, no struggle has been resolved, no emotional barrier has been overcome. What began as a nonlinear narrative has become a circular story of return: the mothers’ embrace, rekindling an erstwhile friendship. When half, if not more, of the characters resemble what the critic Marta Figlerowicz has called “flat protagonists,” formal balance cannot alone ballast the narrative.72 As in politics, populism in literature is a cheap form of political argument. It taps into emotional topics without searching for narrative depth. It dispenses with the time and thought required to evaluate political ideas in favor of the formal appearance of equality. If the literary populism on display in Patria re-creates the oratory power of the former German chancellor Willy Brandt—one of the politicians Aramburu appears to most admire—it also re-creates the vacuity of political speech.73

Coda

Journalism’s Sonnet

Early in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1995 film, La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret), we see a writer and editor meet inside the printing room at the El País headquarters in Madrid. “I would like to write about literature for your paper,” the writer says. This is the first time the two have met, having been connected through a mutual friend. As the conversation moves from the printing floor to the editorial offices, the gap between the writer’s ambitions and reality widens. “I don’t want this job as a favor to my friend,” she explains. “I actually want to earn it, but I haven’t published anything. I just have a draft of a novel and two essays,” handing the editor a hefty stack of printouts. Within a matter of scenes, the editor gives the writer a job as a books columnist for the newspaper’s weekend literary supplement. Her first assignment is to review the latest short story collection from a famous author of romance novels, which she gets in part as a result of her open contempt for the novelist. The editor, who is a fan of the novelist, assigns himself a positive review of the same collection, which will appear alongside the writer’s negative review.1 Soon comes the twist: the amateur writer who landed the gig as a columnist is, in fact, the pseudonymous romance author whose book she is supposed to review. The twist throws into relief the film’s many ironic criticisms of newspaper columns and novelist intellectuals. In 1990s Spain, the film seems to argue, newspaper columns are a dime a dozen. Any amateur writer with a personal connection to an editor can land one. Moreover, columns in the Sunday pages function as cultural 225

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gatekeepers, allowing a high-minded newspaper like El País to decide which artifacts of popular culture deserve the stamp of approval. Not only that: nepotism is rampant in the clubby world of newspapers. So rampant, in fact, that writers are even allowed to review their own books! And, to cap it all off, shady editorial decisions often hide behind an outward appearance of balance, where each side of an issue receives equal column space—literally, in the case of the short story collection, which will receive exactly one positive and one negative review. Once you see how the sausage is made, such balance, the film underscores, looks more and more like a charade. A decade later, Almodóvar’s criticisms of newspaper opinion columns would seem prescient. In a 2005 column for El País, the writer Elvira Lindo diagnosed—and, as an op-ed columnist, self-diagnosed—a condition that increasingly afflicted the Spanish public sphere: “opinionism.” Every morning, she wrote, thousands of professional opinionmakers go to work knowing “that they have to come with a well-formed opinion . . . that they must defend it vehemently . . . [and] that they must draw blood from those who don’t think the same way.”2 Whether these opinionators actually had any expertise, knowledge, or worthwhile opinions on the topics of the day, she noted, was beside the point. They were required to have opinions all the same, whether that pressure came from a public sphere in which not having a forceful opinion was “interpreted as not wanting to take sides or just being an idiot,” or from the desire to keep one of the precious few jobs in the opinion-making industry. Fast-forward a decade and opinion-making appears to have been democratized. In a 2018 editorial, the American literary magazine n+1 diagnosed “the generalization of the op-ed form across the internet.” “Everything is an op-ed now,” the editors argued. For every columnist at a highly visible outlet like the New York Times, there is an entire “reserve army of op-ed labor waiting in the wings.” Social media in particular “has helped turn the internet into an engine for producing op-eds, for turning writers into op-ed writers, and for turning readers into people on the hunt for an op-ed.”3 This phenomenon has also taken root



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in Spain. “The great cancer of journalism in Spain is to have overvalued columnists (including myself ),” the columnist Quique Peinado said in a rabble-rousing interview in 2017.4 After all, the twenty-first century had conditioned journalists and writers to produce opinion columns on demand. Others took this diagnosis even further, proclaiming the opinion columnist, as a figure of intellectual prestige, all but dead.5 Yet such reports of death are often greatly exaggerated. As the historian and opinion columnist Santos Juliá noted in 2014, “The intellectual has not died, but, rather, has been democratized.”6 To become an intellectual in Spain one no longer needed one of the precious few columnist jobs at El País, El Mundo, or another one of Spain’s national newspapers. But one still likely needed an opinion column. “The opinion column is the sonnet of journalism.”7 No line connecting literature and journalism has become quite so iconic in Spain. Its author, Francisco Umbral, perhaps the country’s most influential columnist since the transition to democracy, first made the comparison in the early 1980s, in the introduction to Spleen de Madrid 2 (1982), a collection of Baudelaire-inspired columns on the countercultural scene in the Spanish capital. The phrase has since become a literaryjournalistic refrain, with much energy spent attempting to peel back its layers of meaning.8 Many commentators have taken this phrase to refer to the column’s literary qualities. Like Baudelaire’s prose poetry, Umbral’s opinion columns are said to innovate aesthetically from compressing meaning and observation into a limited prose structure.9 For me, however, the oft-quoted phrase most importantly draws our attention to the genre’s durability. The op-ed’s durability as a genre of opinion writing is indeed puzzling. Despite fears that an array of new short form writing on the internet would spell an end to the op-ed, the opposite seems to have happened. Blog posts and Twitter threads have morphed into “think pieces,” each of which argues its own “hot take” on current affairs.10 Make no mistake: this is the language of opinion journalism, dressed-up for twenty-first century internet culture. If forms of internet writing had become as universal and generalized as many had assumed, there

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would be no need to convert their arguments into an op-ed form. But opeds are still the universal medium of opinion writing. The genre’s capaciousness to translate ideas that were initially published on Twitter or Facebook, delivered as TED talks or academic lectures, or written for peer-reviewed journals or personal diaries, remains unparalleled even today.11 Although the New York Times decided to retire its use of the term “op-ed” some five decades after popularizing it, the form of opinion journalism the term came to represent will very likely endure for decades to come.12 Given the durability of the op-ed, what might become of the op-ed novel? Unlike the opinion column, the op-ed novel has not yet consolidated into a genre. It might even be difficult to call it a literary form, though, as this book has argued, it has revitalized old forms (novel of ideas), made use of current ones (autofiction), and even created its own (literary populism). The op-ed novel is more of a style, a disposition, an orientation, which brings together opinion journalism and literary fiction as a means of intervening in the debates of the present. In recent years, several novelists of the heterodox group studied in this book have doubled down on the op-ed novel. Almudena Grandes, before her untimely death in 2021, took a hiatus from her ongoing series of historical novels to write Todo va a mejorar, a novel that reflects on the global pandemic that swept the world in 2020. Just as with her 2015 novel Los besos en el pan, the new novel commented directly and unapologetically on some of the most acute issues of Spanish political life such as the rise of the far-right, attempts to run governments like businesses, or the coming together of public health and the security state.13 In 2023, Fernando Aramburu published the novel Hijos de la fábula (Sons of the fable), a follow-up to his bestselling and award-winning novel about the Basque conflict. The novel, which is about two young men who attempt to join ETA just as the group is ceasing its armed struggle, is told exclusively from the perspective of the aspiring militants, perhaps in response to criticisms that Patria was too one-sided. Meanwhile, Javier Cercas, in his collection of opinion pieces titled No callar (Not keeping quiet, 2023), followed in the footsteps of Antonio Muñoz Molina and



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Javier Marías by disavowing his status as an intellectual and erecting a wall between his—or anyone else’s—literary and opinion writing. After a year of writing opinion columns, Elena Ferrante had one regret. “I left out only one feeling among those that interest me,” she admitted to readers in her final column for The Guardian’s weekend magazine. That feeling, she said, was “inequality.” The admission was strange. Her four-novel Neapolitan Quartet, which catapulted the pseudonymous Italian novelist to worldwide fame, had narrated overlapping stories of economic, sexual, and social inequality through the half-century-long friendship of two women in postwar Naples. In fact, inequality had been a foundational theme of much of Ferrante’s fiction up to that point. But in her opinion writing, she said, it had become secondary. “Even if I never have this experience again,” she wrote of having an opinion column, “it was very useful to me.”14 In recent years, Spain’s novelist intellectuals have seldom shown such awareness of their own shortcomings. Perhaps this has to do with the growing economic and social distance between themselves and their readers. Perhaps it has to do with the comforts that come with spending decades working for the same newspaper. Or perhaps it is because they can no longer imagine a new kind of public, one that might be brought into being through novels and op-eds. With the further democratization of intellectual life will come new readers. Will Spain’s novelist intellectuals of the future be courageous enough to reimagine this new public? If they are, we will likely notice it on the op-ed page.

NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX

Notes Book Epigraph Roland Barthes, “From Them to Us,” trans. Chris Turner, Masculine, Feminine, Neuter and Other Writings on Literature: Essays and Interviews, Volume 3 (London: Seagull Books, 2016), 123–124; translation modified. Introduction 1 The data in this paragraph was compiled from the El País website, which lists all its regular columnists and contributing opinion writers. See https://elpais.com /opinion/firmas/. Novelists who are columnists include Elvira Lindo, Vicente Molina Foix, Martín Caparrós, Félix de Azúa, Irene Vallejo, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Ana Iris Simón, Sergio del Molino, Fernando Aramburu, Najat El Hachmi, Daniel Gascón, Manuel Jabois, Nuria Labari, Marina Perezagua, Patricio Pron, Fernando Savater, David Trueba, Manuel Vincent, and Manuel Vilas. The remaining contributors, those who have published a one-off novel or are otherwise artistic professionals, include Isabel Coixet, Luis García Montero, Azahara Palomeque, Eliane Braum, Álex Grijelmo, and Moisés Naím. 2 This data was compiled from the following sources: Hadas Gold, “New York Times Adds 20 Opinion Writers,” Politico, 18 March 2015, https://www.politico .com/blogs/media/2015/03/new-york-times-adds-20-opinion-writers-204178; “Announcing New Contributors to the Op-Ed Section,” The New York Times Company, 24 January 2018, https://www.nytco.com/press/announcing-new -contributors-to-the-op-ed-section/; “Introducing Opinion’s Contributing Writers and Design Changes,” The New York Times Company, 26 April 2021. In the 2018 announcement, the Times claims to have “a talented international corps of more than 60 contributing opinion writers.” Yet it has never made publicly available its roster of contributing opinion writers. Such a number of contributing opinion writers, which would nearly double the roughly thirty to thirty-five writers whom it has included in announcements previously and since, would likely put the overall percentage of novelists among its opinion journalists in the single digits. 3 This data was compiled from the Le Monde website by culling a list of columnists from a four-month sample of articles in the “Chroniques” (“Columnists”)

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section between April and July 2022, yielding thirty-nine columnists. This yield is slightly higher than the number of New York Times columnists and significantly lower than the number of El País columnists. 4 Françoise Fressoz coauthored the novel with her colleague, the legal journalist Pascale Robert-Diard. The novel was first serialized by Le Monde and later published in print under the pseudonym Cassiopée. See Cassiopée, Le Procès de Jacques Chirac (Paris: Les Arènes/Le Monde, 2010). 5 Notable New York Times opinion writers who are also novelists in recent years have included Roxane Gay, Lydia Millet, Manil Suri, Héctor Tobar, Jennifer Weiner, Vanessa Barbara, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. At Le Monde, notable columnists who are also novelists have included Michel Guerrin, Gilles Paris, and Marie Charrel. 6 See, for example, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 2007); Laura Vilardell, Books against Tyranny: Catalan Publishers Under Franco (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). 7 Luis Veres Cortés, “Lenguaje y censura literaria y periodística en el Franquismo,” Historia y Comunicación Social 14 (2009): 182. 8 Antonio Alférez, Cuarto Poder en España: La Prensa desde la Ley Fraga 1966 (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1986), 12–14. 9 Alexis Grohmann, “El columnismo de escritores españoles (1975–2005): hacia un nuevo género literario,” in El columnismo de escritores españoles (1975– 2005), eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2006), 16–17. 10 María Jesús Casals Carro, “La opinión en la prensa: retrato de España en el primer año del siglo XXI,” Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico 10 (2004), 46–48. 11 María Cruz Seoane, Historia del periodismo en España, vol. 2, Siglo XIX (Madrid: Alianza, 1996), 14 n.8. 12 Quoted in Seoane, Historia del periodismo en España, vol. 2, 21. 13 On Spain’s first freedom of the press laws, see, for example, Emilio La Parra López, La libertad de prensa en las Cortes de Cádiz (Valencia: Nau Llibres, 1984). 14 Henry F. Schulte, The Spanish Press, 1470–1966: Print, Power and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 140–142. 15 Miguel García Posada, “El columnismo como género literario,” in Literatura y periodismo: La prensa como espacio creativo, ed. Salvador Montesa (Málaga: Congreso de Literatura Española Contemporánea, 2003), 62. 16 Gregorio C. Martín, “Mariano José de Larra,” in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 362–363.



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17 José Acosta Montoro, Periodismo y literatura, vol. 1 (Madrid: Ediciones Guardarrama, 1973), 82. 18 Jorge Miguel Rodríguez Rodríguez, “Literatos y periodistas: Los orígenes de una tradición de encuentros y desencuentros,” in El artículo literario: Manuel Alcántara, eds. Teodoro León Gross and Bernardo Gómez Calderón (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2008), 45. 19 Rodríguez Rodríguez, “Literatos y periodistas,” 46; Seoane, Historia del periodismo en España, vol. 2, 14 n.8 20 María Cruz Seoane, “El periodismo como género literario y como tema novelesco,” in Literatura y periodismo: La prensa como espacio creativo, ed. Salvador Montesa (Málaga: Congreso de Literatura Española Contemporánea, 2003), 22–25. 21 María Cruz Seoane, “Para una historia de la columna literaria,” Ínsula 703–704 (2005): 10. 22 Sonia F. Parratt, Introducción al reportaje. Antecedentes, actualidad, perspectivas (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2003), 63. 23 See Ángeles Quesada Novás, “Literatura ilustrada en revistas madrileñas fin de siglo (1890–1900): Introducción,” Siglo diecinueve: Literatura hispánica 13 (2013): 79–113. 24 See Tania Gentic, The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 55–93. 25 Carlos X. Ardavín, “Eugenio d’Ors entre nosotros,” in Oceanografía de Xènius. Estudios críticos en torno a Eugenio d’Ors, eds. Carlos X. Ardavín, Eloy E. Merino, and Xavier Pla (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2005), 16 n.40. 26 See Gayle Rogers, Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 19; see also 29–63. 27 Quoted in Rogers, Modernism and the New Spain, 20. 28 María Cruz Seoane and Susana Sueiro, Una historia de El País y del Grupo Prisa (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 2004), 50. 29 Seoane, “Para una historia de la columna literaria,” 10. 30 See Alexis Grohmann, “La escritura impertinente,” Ínsula 703–704 (2005): 2–3. 31 For more on Galdós and the novel of ideas, see Chapter 5. 32 Francisco Ayala, “El novelista intelectual,” El País, 6 January 1983. 33 Ayala, “El novelista intelectual.” 34 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 130. 35 Because data is very limited, it is difficult to say with any certainty how many readers regularly read opinion columns, let alone how many read opinion

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columns by the novelist intellectuals studied in this book. The scholar Ricardo Saavedra Fernández-Combarro has reasonably claimed that “[Francisco] Umbral, with his column, guaranteed tens of thousands of readers for El Mundo.” That was in the 1990s and early 2000s. Today’s columnists may generate the same numbers of readers, if not fewer. See A. Fernández, “‘En algunas columnas de prensa hay más literatura que en mucha poesía española,’” La Nueva España, 26 July 2010. 36 According to Nielsen BookScan, in 2017, novelist intellectuals with readerships in the tens of thousands included: Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s Falcó (60,747 copies sold), Almudena Grandes’s Los pacientes del doctor García (59,271 copies sold), Javier Marías’s Berta Isla (33,123 copies sold), and Fernando Aramburu’s Patria (397,077 copies sold). Furthermore, these novels continued to sell well beyond the period in which this data was collected. Today, according to the publishers, Patria, for instance, has sold at least 1.2 million copies while Falcó and Los pacientes del doctor García have sold at least 300,000 and 200,000 copies respectively. See Inés Martín Rodrigo, “La alargada sombra de «Patria»: los diez libros más vendidos de 2017,” ABC 26 December 2017; Miguel Lorenci, “Tras el ciclón de ‘Patria,’ Fernando Aramburu regresará en septiembre con ‘Los vencejos,’” El Heraldo, 29 April 2021; Óscar Sáenz de Santa María Gómez-Mampaso, ed. El sector del libro en España: Abril 2018 (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 2018), 72–73. 37 Given the worldwide reach of these novels, it is difficult to find numbers of sales only in Spain. However, publicly available evidence suggests that the majority of each novel’s sales occurred in Spain. See “‘La velocidad de la luz’, la primera novela de Cercas en cuatro años,” ElMundoLibro.com, 24 January 2005; Juan Silvestre, “‘El corazón helado,’ de Almudena Grandes, se convertirá en serie,” Fotogramas, 9 March 2021; “Javier Marías: ‘Quizá esta obra sea mi mejor fracaso,’” Europa Press, 18 November 2009. 38 James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 1999), xiv. 39 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 243, 240, 7. 40 See Ulrich Winter, “Literatura, periodismo y ‘campo intelectual.’ Algunas observaciones acerca del columnismo de escritores a principios de los años 90,” in Entre el ocio y el negiocio: Industria editorial y literatura en la España de los 90, eds. José Manuel López de Abiada, Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, and Agusta López Bernasocchi (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2001), 293–304; Ulrich Winter, “Entre dos aguas: Literatura y periodismo. El columnismo de escritores y la evolución del campo intelectual desde los años ochenta,” Ínsula 703–704 (2005): 21–23;



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Encarna Alonso Valero, “Los artículos literarios de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 805–806 (2017): 48–60; and David K. Herzberger, “La disciplina de escribir: El columnismo literario de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” in El columnismo de escritores españoles, 45–58; David K. Herzberger, A Companion to Javier Marías (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2011), 17–45. 41 Anthony Cummins, “Vernon Subutex 3 by Virginie Despentes review – perfectly over-the-top end to Parisian potboiler,” The Guardian, 7 July 2020. 42 Lisa Borst, “The Everything Snore,” n+1, 21 December 2021. 43 Dwight Garner, “An Op-Ed Essay Masquerading as a Novel,” The New York Times Book Review (15 September 2021), C3. 44 For alternative perspectives on the so-called death of the author debates, see Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992); Peter Lamarque, “The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 30.4 (1990): 319–331; Michael North, “Authorship and Autography,” PMLA 116.5 (2001): 1377–1385. 45 The degree to which nonfiction writing must adhere to verifiable truths governs how it can use aesthetics and narrative in a way that fiction writing does not. 46 For a critique of Menasse’s novel that echoes many of those that appear in this book, see Adrian Daub, “A Man in Brussels,” Public Books, 30 April 2020. 47 See Clayton Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Álvaro SantanaAcuña, Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 48 See Phillipa K. Chong, Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020); Wendy Griswold, Regionalism and the Reading Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 49 Sarah M. Corse and Monica D. Griffin, “Cultural Valorization and African American Literary History: Reconstructing the Canon,” Sociological Forum 12.2 (1997): 173–203; Sarah M. Corse and Saundra Davis Westervelt, “Gender and Literary Valorization: The Awakening of a Canonical Novel,” Sociological Perspectives 45.2 (2002): 139–161. 50 Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 47. 51 Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 9. 52 Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture, in Collected Works of Karl Mannheim, vol. 7 (London: Routledge & Paul, 1956), 205.

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53 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 67–71; Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 203–217. 54 Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage, 1996), 11. 55 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 19. 56 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 14. 57 See, for example, Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 58 Sheridan Gilley, “Chesterton, Journalism and Modern English Culture,” The Chesterton Review 33.3–4 (2007): 509–526. 59 See Marie-Françoise Melmoux-Montaubin, “Chroniqueurs et romanciers. Réflexion sur une forme de la modernité littéraire,” in Rythmes, histoire, littérature, culture, eds. Marie Blaise and Alain Vaillant (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2014), 151–170. 60 Although Hughes was, of course, more famous for his poetry, he wrote a dozen works of fiction. Since the purpose of this book is to show how fiction and nonfiction interact, throughout the book I identify writers with the term “novelist” perhaps more liberally than others. On Hughes’s column-writing, see Christopher C. De Santis, ed., Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 61 See, for example, Richard Lance Keeble and John Tulloch, eds. Global Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Imagination, vol. 1 (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Richard Lance Keeble and John Tulloch, eds. Global Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Imagination, vol. 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 2014). 62 See Kamel Daoud, Chroniques: Selected Columns, 2010-2016, trans. Elisabeth Zerofsky (New York: Other Press, 2018). 63 See Robyn Creswell, “The Force of Looking,” The Nation (October 14, 2019): 30. 64 See Francesca Forcolin, Christine Angot, une écriture de l’altérité (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2021). 65 Other contemporary novelists who have also been columnists include the English novelist Zadie Smith; the Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen; the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck; the Chinese science fiction



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writer Ma Boyong; the Algerian writer Samir Kacimi; the Bosnian writers Saša Stanišić and Miljenko Jergović; the Croatian writer Ivana Bodrožić; the German journalist-turned-novelist Viola Roggenkamp; the British novelist intellectuals Will Self and John Lanchester; the Angolan-born novelist Kalaf Epalanga; and Umberto Eco, who wrote regularly for La Repubblica and had a last-page column for the weekly Espresso for decades. 66 See, for example, Gentic, The Everyday Atlantic; Aníbal González, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Pablo Calvi, Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). 67 See Luis Monguió, “The Social Status of the Spanish Novelists in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10.3 (1952): 264–272. 68 See, for example, Marieke Dubbelboer, “‘Il faut vivre’: Writers, Journalists and Income, 1890–1914,” Dix-Neuf 21.4 (2017): 342–360. 69 Rodríguez Rodríguez, “Literatos y periodistas,” 45. 70 Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 97. 71 On the origins of journalistic objectivity, see Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 179–197. 72 On the economics of contemporary literature, see Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Simone Murray, The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Dan N. Sinykin, “The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007,” Contemporary Literature 58.4 (2017): 462–491. 73 “Los escritores en España, en una situación ‘desoladora’: Casi el 80% no supera 1.000 euros anuales por derechos de autor,” Europa Press, 18 December 2019. 74 See the Authors Guild 2018 Author Income Survey, “Authors Guild Survey Shows Drastic 42 Percent Decline in Authors Earnings in Last Decade,” The Author’s Guild, 5 January 2019, https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy /authors-guild-survey-shows-drastic-42-percent-decline-in-authors-earnings -in-last-decade/; Authors Guild 2018 Author Income Survey, “Six Takeaways from the Authors Guild 2018 Author Income Survey,” The Author’s Guild, 5 January 2019, https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/six-takeaways -from-the-authors-guild-2018-authors-income-survey/; Sukhpreet Singh, Martin Kretschmer, and Andres Azqueta Gavaldon, 2018 Authors’ Earnings: A Survey of UK Writers (London: ACLS, 2018); The Royal Society of Literature, A Room of

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My Own: What Writers Need to Work Today (London: Royal Society of Literature, April 2019). 75 See Childress, Under the Cover, 37–58. 76 The lone author who got into column writing late in his career, Fernando Aramburu, only did so after publishing one of the best-selling works of literary fiction of the new millennium. For more on Aramburu, see Chapter 6. 77 Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid, Informe Anual de la Profesión Periodística 2020 (Madrid, 2020), 34. 78 Carlos Fonseca et al., “Sin periodistas no hay periodismo,” La Marea 69 (March 2019): 14. 79 An investigation into political corruption by El País revealed that Ignacio González, the former regional president of Madrid, earned €4,500 per month for his bimonthly column for La Razón from 2015 to 2017. La Razón’s budget, at the time, was roughly one-third of El País’s. See José Antonio Hernández and José María Irujo, “El testaferro del ‘caso Lezo’ reprochó a Ignacio González su obsesión por el dinero,” El País, 29 April 2017; “La Razón vuelve a tener un beneficio exiguo: 17.123 euros,” Dircomfidencial, 3 February 2017, https:// dircomfidencial.com/medios/alberto-garcia-reyes-sustituye-al-historico -alvaro-ybarra-al-frente-del-abc-de-sevilla-20220718-1104/. 80 Founded in 1964 by the future Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela, Alfaguara was sold in 1980 to Santillana, a publishing conglomerate that mostly focused on textbooks and children’s literature. Santillana had been founded in 1958 by Jesús de Polanco, who would go on to cofound Prisa in 1972 with José Ortega Spottorno, the founder of the literary publishing house Alianza as well as a cofounder of El País. 81 See Constantino Bértolo, “La muerte del crítico: PRISA contra PRISA,” Rebelión, 22 December 2004, https://rebelion.org/la-muerte-del-critico-prisa -contra-prisa/; Manuel García-Viñó, El País: La cultura como negocio (Tafalla: Txalaparta, 2006); Sarah E. L. Bowskill, The Politics of Literary Prestige: Prizes and Spanish American Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 51–70. 82 See Fernando Sánchez Dragó, “De la literatura a la inquisición,” El Mundo, 30 November 2000; Fernando Sánchez Dragó, “Cosas que traerán cola,” El Mundo, 1 December 2000; Juan Manuel de Prada, “Cainismo cultural,” ABC, 2 December 2000; Juan Jesús Aznárez, “350.000 visitantes certifican el éxito de la Feria del Libro de Guadalajara,” El País, 5 December 2000; Juan Manuel de Prada, “Puntualizaciones,” El País, 7 December 2000; Juan José Millás, “Guadalajara,” El País, 8 December 2000; Ramón Sánchez Lizarralde, “Y dale con Guadalajara (México),” El País, 18 December 2000. 83 See, for example, Ulrich Winter, “Literatura, periodismo y ‘campo intelectual,’” 297.



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84 Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, La desfachatez intelectual: Escritores e intelectuales ante la política (Madrid: Catarata, 2016), 30. 1. A Literary History of Opinion Journalism 1 Juan Luis Cebrián, The Press and Main Street: El País—Journalism in Democratic Spain, trans. Brian Nienhaus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 69; Juan Luis Cebrián, La prensa y la calle: Escritos sobre periodismo (Madrid: Editorial Nuestra Cultura, 1980), 68. 2 Juan Luis Cebrián, “El país que queremos,” El País, 4 May 1976, 6. 3 “Op. Ed. Page,” New York Times, 21 September 1970, 42. 4 The other newspaper launched that year was Diario 16, which first appeared in October 1976, just months after El País. Perhaps the second-most important paper during the transition to democracy, the paper was edited by Pedro J. Ramírez for most of the 1980s. In 1989, Ramírez left Diario 16 to found El Mundo, which has become the second-highest-circulating paper in Spain. 5 Cebrián, The Press and Main Street, 69; Cebrián, La prensa y la calle, 68; translation modified. 6 For typological accounts of opinion writing, see, for example, Amando de Miguel, Sociología de las páginas de opinión (Barcelona: Editorial ATE, 1982); Luisa Santamaría, “Modos argumentativos en el periodismo de opinión,” Periodística 6 (1993): 79–88; Fernando López Pan, “Periodismo literario: Entre la literatura constitutiva y la condicional,” Ámbitos: Revista andaluza de comunicación 19 (2010): 97–116. 7 See, for instance, Raphael Minder, “El País Columnist Says Dismissal Tied to His Criticism of Media Independence,” New York Times, 12 November 2015, A8. For critical accounts of the El País op-ed page from different ideological persuasions, see, for example, Luis Balcarce, PRISA. Liquidación de existencias (Madrid: Foca, 2018); Manuel García Viñó, El País: La cultura como negocio (Tafalla: Editorial Txalaparta, 2006); Gregorio Morán, El cura y los mandarines: Historia no oficial del Bosque de los Letrados: Cultura y política en España, 1962–1992 (Madrid: Akal, 2014); José Manuel de Pablos Coello, El periodismo herido. Estudios que delatan divorcio entre prensa y sociedad: El País, como referente (Madrid: Foca Ediciones, 2001). For discussion of specific literary writers, see, for example, Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, La desfachatez intelectual: Escritores e intelectuales ante la política (Madrid: Catarata, 2016). 8 See Hussein Fancy, “‘The New Convivencia,’” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 11.3 (2019): 295–305. See also Américo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History [1948], trans. Edmund L. King (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954).

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9 According to the Archivo Linz de la Transición española, the digitized personal newspaper archive of Yale political science professor Juan José Linz, the word convivencia appears in no fewer than fifty-six headlines between 1976 and 1977. See Archivo Linz de la Transición, (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2010), https://www.march.es/es/coleccion/archivo-linz-transicion-espanola. 10 For more on this coup attempt, see Chapter 4. 11 See Michael J. Socolow, “A Profitable Public Sphere: The Creation of the New York Times Op-Ed Page,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 87.2 (2010): 281–296. 12 That newspaper was Pueblo. Cebrián’s appointment was supported by theneditor Emilio Romero, one of the most influential journalists of the Franco regime. Carlos Barrera, Periodismo y franquismo: De la censura a la apertura (Barcelona: Ediciones Internacionales Universitarias, 1995), 143. 13 María Cruz Seoane and Susana Sueiro, Una historia de El País y del Grupo Prisa (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 2004), 53. 14 Gregorio Morán, El precio de la transición, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Akal, 2015), 93. 15 Alan Riding, “Press Empire Wields Great Power in Spain,” New York Times, 1 April 1991, D8. 16 Mercedes Cabrera, “Jesús de Polanco and the Prisa Group,” Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business 3.1 (2018): 247–280. 17 Luis A. Albornoz, Ana I. Segovia, and Núria Almiron, Grupo Prisa: Media Power in Contemporary Spain (London: Routledge, 2020), 22. 18 Enrique González Duro, Polanco: El señor de El País (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 2011), 22–25. 19 The parent company’s founding group, Promotora de Informaciones S. A. (i.e., Prisa), consisted of José Ortega Spottorno (son of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, editor of Revista de Occidente and founder of Alianza Editorial), Carlos Mendo (former managing director of the Spanish news agency EFE), Darío Valcárcel ( journalist for ABC), Juan José de Carlos (lawyer and friend of Ortega), and Ramón Jordán de Urríes (aristocrat and friend of Valcárcel). See Seoane and Sueiro, Una historia de El País, 23–24. 20 Despite a liberalization of the Spanish press that had begun with the 1966 Fraga Law, Francoist censors still exerted significant censorship over publishing. See, for example, Ricardo Martín de la Guardia, “Censura y creación de opinión entre el final del franquismo y la transición a la democracia (1973–1978),” Investigaciones Históricas: Época moderna y contemporánea No Extraordinario 1 (2021): 659–682. 21 Jordi Gracia, Javier Pradera o el poder de la izquierda. Medio siglo de cultura democrática (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2019), 198.



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22 Luis Negró Acedo, El diario El País y la cultura de élites durante la Transición (Madrid: Foca, 2006), 12. 23 For background on the relationship between Marías and Aranguren, see Chapter 3 on Javier Marías. 24 José Luis López-Aranguren, “El País como empresa e ‘intelectual colectivo,’” El País, 6 June 1981. 25 Antonio Espantaleón Peralta, “El País” y la transición política (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2002), 19. 26 Jesús Ibáñez, Por una sociología de la vida cotidiana (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1994), 204. The phrase plays on the name of the newspaper and translates literally as “the kidnapping of the country by The Country.” 27 Rafael Alberti, “A León Felipe, en su homenaje,” El País, 4 May 1976. 28 Ricardo de la Cierva, “Un arco y una clave,” El País, 4 May 1976. 29 Michael Richards, After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-Making Spain Since 1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 254–255. 30 For an account of how exiled writers were erased from general literary reference books in Spain, see Chapter 3 on Javier Marías. 31 Socolow, “A Profitable Public Sphere,” 291. 32 José Vidal Beneyto, “Nota sobre colaboradores de ‘opinión,’” in El País o la referencia dominante, eds. Gérard Imbert and José Vidal Beneyto (Barcelona: Editorial Mitre, 1986), 152. 33 See, for instance, Catherine Davies, Contemporary Feminist Fiction in Spain: The Work of Montserrat Roig and Rosa Montero (Oxford: Berg, 1994); Mazal Oknín, Feminism, Writing and the Media in Spain: Ana María Matute, Rosa Montero and Lucía Etxebarria (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 61–119. For Montero’s own account of her relationship with Roig, see Rosa Montero, “Más viva que yo,” El País, 4 December 2021. 34 Samuel Amell, “El periodismo: Su influencia e importancia en la novela del postfranquismo,” Castilla: Estudios de literatura 14 (1989): 12. 35 Amell, “El periodismo,” 12. Cebrián has gone on to publish three more novels: La isla del viento (1990), La agonía del dragón (2000), and Francomoribundia (2003). For an account of how Cebrián’s journalistic work has influenced his novels, see, for instance, Violeta Ros Ferrer, La memoria de los otros. Relatos y resignificaciones de la Transición española en la novela actual (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2020), 125–147. 36 Haley O’Neil, “Making Feminism Funny: Maruja Torres’s Parodies in Por favor,” Mirada Hispánica 7 (2013): 73–85; Katarzyna Moszczyńska-Dürst and Rodrigo Pardo Fernández, “Hacia una lectura sociocrítica de La función delta y Te trataré como a una reina, de Rosa Montero,” Sociocriticism 28.1–2 (2013): 371–393.

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37 See, for example, Paz Villar Hernández, “El articulismo de Rosa Montero: Agudeza, ironía y compromise social,” in Artículo Femenino Singular. Diez mujeres fundamentales para la historia del articulismo literario, eds. Teodoro León Gross and María Angulo Egea (Madrid: Ediciones APM, 2011), 299–305; Amell, “El periodismo,” 10–11. 38 On Peri Rossi’s journalism, see, for example, Mercedes Rowinsky, “Introducción,” in El pulso del mundo: Artículos periodísticos, 1978–2002, ed. Mercedes Rowinsky (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2003), 11–24. This volume collects many of Peri Rossi’s articles from El País. See Peri Rosi, El pulso del mundo, 29– 31, 32–34, 51–55, 59–60, 79–89, 129–131, 133–140, 157–159, 179–183, 255–256. 39 Quoted in Seoane and Sueiro, Una historia de El País, 217. 40 Seoane and Sueiro, Una historia de El País, 325. 41 Seoane and Sueiro, Una historia de El País, 95. 42 José María Plaza, “La columna según Umbral,” El Mundo, 5 October 2014. See also Eduardo Martínez Rico, “El columnismo de Francisco Umbral y el articulismo literario contemporáneo,” Dicenda. Estudios de lengua y literatura españolas 38 (2020): 51–61; Bénédicte de Buron-Brun, ed., Francisco Umbral. Verdades y contraverdades del cuarto poder (Sevilla: Editorial Renacimiento, 2015). 43 Seoane and Sueiro, Una historia de El País, 263–264. 44 David W. Dunlap, “1985: Reaching an Earlier Million,” New York Times, 8 October 2015. 45 Concha Edo, La crisis de la prensa diaria (Barcelona: Ariel, 1994), 30. 46 On the political interests guiding the Corriere della Sera’s early backing of El Mundo, see Sebastiaan Faber, Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Second Transition (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2021), 158–159. 47 On Umbral’s writing for El Mundo, see José María Ferri Coll, “El mundo en una columna. Umbral y lo breve,” in Francisco Umbral. Verdades y contraverdades del cuarto poder, ed. Bénédicte de Buron-Brun (Sevilla: Editorial Renacimiento, 2015), 35–44. 48 Francisco Umbral, “Comer, Joder y Caminar,” El Mundo, 23 October 1989, 7. 49 Neil Nemeth, “Ombudsman Venture Began at Old New York World,” Newspaper Research Journal 31.1 (2010): 37. 50 Takeshi Maezawa, “The Controversy over the Origins and Functions of Ombudsmanship,” Communication Science 11.5 (2000); reprinted at www .newsombudsmen.org. 51 Kimiko Akita and Rick Kenney, “What’s a Newspaper Ombudsman? Notes on a Cross-Cultural Debate,” Journal of Cultural Symbiosis Research 10.3 (2016): 128. http://db.csri.for.aichi-pu.ac.jp/10-9.pdf.



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52 Dolors Palau-Sampio, Juan Francisco Gutiérrez-Lozano, and Josep Lluís Gómez-Mompart, “Ombudsman y lectores activos: La interacción en torno a la calidad periodística,” Revista Latina de Comunicación Social 71 (2016): 1345. 53 See, for example, Socolow, “A Profitable Public Sphere,” 282–288; Jerelle Kraus, All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 11–12. 54 Kraus, All the Art That’s Fit to Print, 11. 55 “Op. Ed. Page,” 42. 56 Quoted in Socolow, “A Profitable Public Sphere,” 286. 57 Socolow, “A Profitable Public Sphere,” 291. 58 Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 66. 59 Quoted in Karl E. Meyer, “The Forthright Estate,” in Pundits, Poets, and Wits: An Omnibus of American Newspaper Columns, ed. Karl E. Meyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), xxxvii. 60 Socolow, “A Profitable Public Sphere,” 282. 61 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), 88. 62 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 92–93. 63 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 82. 64 Meyer, “The Forthright Estate,” xli. 65 Quoted in Socolow, “A Profitable Public Sphere,” 283. 66 Juan Cruz Ruiz, Una memoria de “El País”: 20 años de vida en una redacción (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1996), 137. 67 Gérard Imbert, Le discours du journal a propos de “El País”: Pour une approche socio-sémiotique du discours du la presse (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1988), 13. 68 Jonathan Blitzer, “The Future Is Not What It Used to Be,” The Nation, 20 February 2012, 30. 69 Blitzer, “The Future Is Not What It Used to Be,” 28. 70 Blitzer, “The Future Is Not What It Used to Be,” 30. 71 See, for instance, Juan Luis Cebrián, Primera página: Vida de un periodista, 1944–1988 (Barcelona: Debate, 2016), 156–157, 289. 72 Cebrián, Primera página, 166. 73 Cebrián, Primera página, 166. 74 Peralta, “El País” y la transición política, 22. 75 Cebrián, Primera página, 165–166.

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76 Novais had been widely celebrated for his role in helping bring down the Franco regime through journalistic reportage. This idealistic portrayal, however, has since unraveled. See Jordi Amat, “El mito Novais” (unpublished manuscript), www.upf.edu/documents/3329911/3489419/Ponència+Jordi+Amat/daadfd4b -1a58-f125-c527-f2c7ea8d5936; Jordi Amat, “Montserrat, núcleo activo,” La Vanguardia, 9 October 2013. 77 Miguel Ángel Aguilar, “Lo que debemos a Novais,” El País, 26 March 1993; Jaume Guillamet, ed. Las sombras de la transición: El relato crítico de los corresponsales extranjeros (1975–1978) (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2016). 78 Clyde Thogmartin, The National Daily Press of France (Birmingham: Summa Publications, 1998), 218. 79 Matthias Revers, Contemporary Journalism in the US and Germany: Agents of Accountability (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 95–97. 80 Marc Blasco-Duatis, Nuria Fernández García, and Isabel Cunha, “Political Opinion in the Spanish Newspapers. Analysis of the Period General Elections Campaign in Spain, 2015,” Revista Latina de Comunicación Social 72 (2017): 361. 81 Patrick Eveno, Le journal Le Monde: Une histoire d’indépendence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001), 130. 82 The op-ed section was only briefly interrupted during the editorship of André Laurens (1982–1985). See Patrick Eveno, Histoire du journal Le Monde, 1944– 2004 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004), 187. 83 Thogmartin, National Daily Press, 219. 84 President Charles De Gaulle’s involvement in founding the paper, it should be noted, might have led to such anxiety over editorial independence and the desire for political unpredictability. 85 Thogmartin, National Daily Press, 221. 86 Thogmartin, National Daily Press, 221. 87 See Seoane and Sueiro, Una historia de El País, 49–55; Gracia, Javier Pradera, 200–201. 88 See the essays in Xavier Pla and Francisco Fuster, eds., El escritor-periodista en España (1900–1950), Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 817–818 (2018): 112–214. 89 See José Bernardo San Juan, “El plan de desarrollo: El periodismo literario también crece,” in De Azorín a Umbral: Un siglo de periodismo literario español, José Bernardo San Juan et al. (La Coruña: Netbiblo, 2009), 572. 90 Pilar Concejo, “La labor periodística de Miguel Delibes,” Revista de la Asociación Europea de Profesores de Español 38–39 (1991): 96. 91 Miguel Delibes and Josep Vergès, Correspondencia, 1948–1986 (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2002), 29–30.



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92 See, for example, Cruz Ruiz, Una memoria de “El País”; Gracia, Javier Pradera; Balcarce, PRISA; Morán, El cura y los mandarines; Morán, El precio de la Transición; and José Ortega Spottorno, Los Ortega: Una saga intelectual en la España del siglo XX (Madrid: Taurus, 2016). 93 Manuel Leguineche, “Fuego y humo,” Urogallo: Revista literaria y cultural 73 (1992): 50. 94 Concejo, “La labor periodística de Miguel Delibes,” 97. 95 Concejo, “La labor periodística de Miguel Delibes,” 91. 2. Anxieties of the Novelist Intellectual 1 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Tarantino y la muerte,” El País, 18 April 1995. 2 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Relato de una violación,” El País, 9 November 1993. 3 Those who criticized Muñoz Molina’s moralizing stances included Camilo José Cela, the critic José Luis García Martín, the journalist Ignacio RuizQuintano, in addition to his fellow novelist intellectuals Marías, Grandes, and Cercas, among others. 4 Javier Marías, “Y encima recochineo,” El País, 1 May 1995. See also Javier Marías, “La risa y la moral,” El País, 27 June 1995. For commentary on the Muñoz Molina-Marías controversy, see Julián Moreiro, Escritores a la greña: envidias, enemistades y trifulcas literarias (Madrid: Editorial EDAF, 2014), 152–153; Agustín Squella, Astillas (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1999), 223–224; Gareth J. Wood, Javier Marías’s Debt to Translation: Sterne, Browne, Nabokov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 233–234. 5 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Tarantino, la muerte y la comedia: una respuesta a Javier Marías,” El País, 9 May 1995. 6 Muñoz Molina, “Tarantino, la muerte y la comedia.” 7 On the global circulation and translations of Muñoz Molina’s fiction, see Maarten Steenmeijer, “Traducción y diffusion de la obra de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 805–806 (2017): 61–75. 8 For work that exclusively treats Muñoz Molina’s novels without engaging with his journalism see, for example, Richard Sperber, The Discourse of Flanerie in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Texts (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015); Olga López-Valero Colbert, The Gaze on the Past: Popular Culture and History in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Novels (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Lawrence Rich, The Narrative of Antonio Muñoz Molina: Self-Conscious Realism and “El Desencanto” (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). For work that exclusively treats Muñoz Molina’s journalism without engaging with his novels, see, for example, Jean-Pierre Castellani, “Antonio Muñoz

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10

11

12 13

14 15

Notes to Pages 57–58

Molina entre literature y periodismo: las columnas en El País Semanal (1998– 2002),” in Literatura y periodismo: La prensa como espacio creativo, ed. Salvador Montesa (Málaga: Congreso de Literatura Española Contemporánea, 2003), 77–92; Isabelle Steffen-Prat, “La paradoja periférica: crónicas y columnas de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” in Centros y periferias: prensa, impresos y territories en el mundo hispánico contemporáneo: Homenaje a Jacqueline Covo-Maurice, eds. Nathalie Ludec and Françoise Dubosquet Lairys (Bordeaux: Institut d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines, 2004), 301–312; YouJeong Choi, “La peculiar invención de la realidad en la escritura de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios 41 (2009). For scholarship that treats both aspects of Muñoz Molina’s oeuvre together, see Joseba Gabilondo, “State Melancholia: Spanish Nationalism, Specularity, and Performance: Notes on Antonio Muñoz Molina,” in From Stateless Nations to Postnational Spain / De naciones sin estado a la España posnacional, ed. Silvia Bermúdez, Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, and Timothy McGovern (Boulder: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2002), 237–271; Sebastiaan Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018), 147–154; Sara Santamaría Colmenero, “El peso de la nación en Antonio Muñoz Molina: patriotismo constitucional y el consenso de la Transición,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 17. 2 (2016): 177–195. See, for instance, Evan Kindley, Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Aurélie Vialette, Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2018). Manuel Ruiz Rico, “El Robinson urbano: Origen periodístico y literario de la obra de Antonio Muñoz Molina en Diario de Granada (1982-1983),” Ámbitos: Revista Internacional de Comunicación 23 (2013). Antonio Muñoz Molina, “El Robinson urbano,” Diario de Granada, May 7, 1982; reprinted in Antonio Muñoz Molina, El Robinson urbano (Pamplona: Pamiela, 1988), 13–15. Muñoz Molina, El Robinson urbano, 13. On Daniel Defoe’s journalism, see J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 32–65. Muñoz Molina, El Robinson urbano, 13. Muñoz Molina, El Robinson urbano, 13–14.



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16 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Escuela de Robinsons,” in El Robinson urbano (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1997), 13. Upon reprinting “Primer Manual” in his collection, Muñoz Molina changed the column’s title to “School for Robinsons,” echoing Jules Verne’s 1882 novel, L’École des Robinsons. It should also be noted that Muñoz Molina’s linking of Joyce and Defoe challenges Joyce’s own view of Defoe. For Joyce, “[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist.” James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe,” trans. Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (1964): 24. 17 Muñoz Molina, it appears, published an article in the first issue of the paper under the pseudonym Alberto Neira. See Manuel Ruiz Rico, “El Robinson urbano. Soporte periodístico y literario en la obra de Antonio Muñoz Molina” (PhD diss., Universidad de Sevilla, 2012), 515. 18 According to the critic Jordi Gracia, Henry Kissinger is said to have claimed that Franco had not been “very repressive” precisely because he tolerated the existence of “opinion-makers.” See Jordi Gracia, Javier Pradera o el poder de la izquierda: Medio siglo de cultura democrática (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2019), 211. 19 David K. Herzberger, “La disciplina de escribir: el columnismo literario de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” in El columnismo de escritores españoles (1975–2005), eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Madrid: Verbum, 2006), 46–47. 20 See, for example, Cristina Gómez Castro, “Translation Choices as Sites of State Power: Gender and Habitus in Bestsellers in Franco’s Spain,” in Translation and Global Spaces of Power, eds. Stefan Baumgarten and Jordi Cornellà-Detrell (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2019), 109–124. 21 “The Major Events of the Day,” New York Times, 5 March 1974, 35. 22 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Autorretrato Biográfico,” Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras 2013 (Madrid: UNED–Calatayud y Punto de Interés Biblioteca, 2013). 23 Muñoz Molina’s El Robinson urbano, published in 1984, is a collection of columns first published in the Diario; the Diario del Nautilus, published in 1985, is a similar collection of columns, originally printed in the newspaper Ideal and the magazine Las Nuevas Letras, both of which Muñoz Molina began writing for in 1983, following his last column in the Diario. See Herzberger, “La disciplina de escribir,” 45–46, and Ruiz Rico, “El Robinson urbano.” The short-lived Diario would eventually close in 1986. 24 Beth Blum, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 165. 25 On service journalism, see, for example, Martin Eide and Graham Knight, “Public/Private Service: Service Journalism and the Problems of Everyday Life,” European Journal of Communication 14.4 (1999): 525–547.

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26 Cited in Fernando Valls, “Los artículos literarios de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” in Antonio Muñoz Molina: Grand Séminaire de Neuchâtel; Coloquio Internacional Antonio Muñoz Molina, 5–6 de junio de 1997 (Madrid: Arco/Libros and U de Neuchâtel, 2009), 125. 27 Quoted in Manuel Ruiz Rico, Antonio Muñoz Molina: El robinson en Nueva York (Seville: Centro Andaluz del Libro, 2011), 37. 28 Herzberger, “La disciplina de escribir,” 47. 29 See Stephanie Sieburth, Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 188–214. 30 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Azares del oficio,” El País (September 17, 2011). 31 Ana Mendoza, “Antonio Muñoz Molina: ‘Me parece un milagro que se me ocurra una novela,’” Diario de Sevilla, 13 January 2016. 32 Antonio Muñoz Molina, El invierno en Lisboa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987); Antonio Muñoz Molina, Winter in Lisbon, trans. Sonia Soto (London: Granta Books, 1999). 33 See, for example, Marta Beatriz Ferrari, “La retórica del artificio: El invierno en Lisboa de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” Confluencia 18.2 (2003): 171–181; Rodrigo Guijarro Lasheras, “La música narrada: El jazz como fenómeno intermedial en El invierno en Lisboa de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 95.7 (2018): 753–766. 34 Pedro Carrero Eras, “La novela premiada de Muñoz Molina y un ensayo de Kundera sobre la novela,” Cuenta y razón 47 (1988): 163; Nelson Marra, “Consagración de un escritor con talento,” El País, 18 June 1987, qtd. in María de las Nieves Ibáñez Ibáñez, “El ‘hibrido narrativo’ en la novela de Antonio Muñoz Molina” (PhD diss., Universidad de la Rioja, 2014), 232. 35 Juana Salabert, “Antonio Muñoz Molina califica ‘El invierno en Lisboa,’ su ultima novela, de ‘jam-session,’” El País, 27 May 1987. 36 See, for example, Eric M. Thau, “‘We’ll always have Lisbon’: Cinematic Intertextuality in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s El invierno en Lisboa,” Literature/Film Quarterly 40.4 (2012): 301–313; Chung-Ying Yang, “Un acercamiento a la representación de la mujer transgresora: Las femmes fatales en El invierno en Lisboa y Beltenebros de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” Hispania 88.3 (2005): 476–482; Timothy P. Reed, “‘Tócalo otra vez, Santiago’: Mass Culture, Memory, and Identity in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s El invierno en Lisboa,” Letras Hispanas 1.1 (2004): 18–36. 37 This piece was included in Muñoz Molina’s second essay collection, which gathered columns appearing in the newspaper Ideal between September 1983 and June 1984. See Antonio Muñoz Molina, Diario del Nautilus (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2002), 73–76.



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38 Muñoz Molina, Diario del Nautilus, 74. 39 Alicia Ramos, “Conversación con Leopoldo Azancot,” Anales de la narrativa española contemporánea 5 (1980): 177. 40 During the early 1990s, Azancot was a columnist for the short-lived newspaper El Independiente. As it turns out, he lost his column after the Nobel Prize– winning Spanish novelist Camilo José Cela, who was also a columnist for the paper, ordered editor in chief Pablo Sebastián to fire Azancot. Cela, it appears, was culminating his two-decade-long grudge against Azancot for having written a negative review of his novel Oficio de tinieblas 5 in 1973. See Tomás García Yebra, Desmontando a Cela (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2002), 96; Ian Gibson, Cela, el hombre que quiso ganar (Madrid: Aguilar, 2003), 160. 41 Leopoldo Azancot, “El invierno en Lisboa,” ABC, 30 May 1987, 56. 42 Muñoz Molina’s first byline in El País appeared in the Economy section of the paper on November 3, 1980. The article covered a dispute among competing labor unions in the construction sector in the city of León. Muñoz Molina then published half a dozen op-eds for the paper during the 1980s, the first in 1986 shortly following the publication of his first novel, Beatus Ille. His regular contribution began with a bi-weekly spot in the “tribuna libre” on January 20, 1990. See Antonio Muñoz Molina, “La construcción de León enfrenta a los sindicatos,” El País, March 11, 1980; Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Duelo o placer de la escritura,” El País, July 7, 1986; Antonio Muñoz Molina, “La ley del bolero,” El País, January 20, 1990. 43 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Teoría del elogio insultante,” El País, 9 March 1994. 44 Camilo José Cela, “Pavana para un doncel tontuelo,” ABC, 10 March 1994. 45 Joseba Gabilondo, “State Melancholia,” 250. 46 Antonio Muñoz Molina, Destierro y destiempo de Max Aub (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1996), 22–23. 47 See Bernardino M. Hernando, La corona de Laurel: Periodistas en la Real Academia Española (Madrid: Asociación de Prensa de Madrid, 2007). 48 On how a writer like Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer traverses the realm of literature and journalism, see, for example, Juan F. Egea, “El manuscrito moderno y la ‘idea Bécquer,’” Revista Hispánica Moderna 71.2 (2018): 151–162. 49 Cited in Ruiz Rico, Antonio Muñoz Molina, 191. 50 José Manuel Begines Hormigo, “La última novelística de Muñoz Molina: de Plenilunio a El viento de la luna,” in Antonio Muñoz Molina, eds. Irene AndrésSuárez and Ana Casas (Neuchâtel y Madrid: Universidad de Neuchâtel-Arco/ Libros, 2009), 83–106. 51 The ones with which Muñoz Molina may have been familiar might include J. M. Roberts, Twentieth Century: A History of the World From 1901 to the Present

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(London: Allen Lane, 1999); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994); or, especially, the essays of Tony Judt, such as “Downhill All the Way,” New York Review of Books, 25 May 1995; “Europe: The Grand Illusion,” New York Review of Books, 11 July 1996. 52 Katherine O. Stafford, “Searching for the Spanish Epic: Antonio Muñoz Molina’s La noche de los tiempos and the Evolution of the Spanish Civil War Novel,” in Narrating War in Peace: The Spanish Civil War in the Transition and Today, ed. Katherine O. Stafford (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 129, 165; see also Begines Hormigo, “La última novelística de Muñoz Molina,” 84. 53 Antonio Muñoz Molina, Como la sombra que se va (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2014), 225; Antonio Muñoz Molina, Like a Fading Shadow, trans. Camilo A. Ramirez (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017), 140. 54 Muñoz Molina, Como la sombra que se va, 211; Muñoz Molina, Like a Fading Shadow, 132. 55 Muñoz Molina, Como la sombra que se va, 317; Muñoz Molina, Like a Fading Shadow, 193. 56 Muñoz Molina, Como la sombra que se va, 70; Muñoz Molina, Like a Fading Shadow, 44. 57 Muñoz Molina, Como la sombra que se va, 73; Muñoz Molina, Like a Fading Shadow, 45. 58 Muñoz Molina, Como la sombra que se va, 158–159; Muñoz Molina, Like a Fading Shadow, 99. 59 Quoted in Sebastiaan Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018), 63. 60 See, for instance, the debate between Sebastiaan Faber and Santos Juliá: Sebastiaan Faber, “The Debate about Spain’s Past and the Crisis of Academic Legitimacy: The Case of Santos Juliá,” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 5 (2007): 165–190; Santos Juliá, “Carta a los Directores,” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 7 (2009): 241–244; Sebastiaan Faber, “Contestación a Santos Juliá,” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 7 (2009): 245–249; Santos Juliá, “Réplica a Sebastiaan Faber,” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 7 (2009): 250. See also Pablo Sánchez León and Jesús Izquierdo Martín, La guerra que nos han contado. 1936 y nosotros (Madrid: Alianza, 2006); Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War, 57–73. 61 See, for example, Zahira Aragüete-Toribio, Producing History in Spanish Civil War Exhumations: From the Archive to the Grave (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Nicole Iturriaga, Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 52–77.



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62 For the account of literary populism, see Chapter 6. 63 Pedro López Manjón, “El paro llega a 6.202.700 personas y la tasa sube al récord del 27,16% en el primer trimestre de 2013,” RTVE, 25 April 2013; Andrés Muñiz, “Nuevo record de desahucios: 526 diarios en el segundo trimestre de 2012,” Público, 2 October 2012). 64 Olga R. Sanmartín, “El número de suicidios crece un 20% desde el inicio de la crisis económica,” El Mundo, 30 March 2016. 65 For further discussion of the 2008 Spanish economic crisis, see Chapter 5. 66 For a thorough examination of this boom, see, for example, Christopher Marcinkoski, The City That Never Was (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), 58–97. 67 Faber, Memory Battles, 147. 68 Antonio Muñoz Molina, Todo lo que era sólido (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2013), 117. 69 On the history of this trope, see, for example, Ruth MacKay, “Lazy, Improvident People”: Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 207–244; Michael Iarocci, Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 4–21. 70 A good example of this involves the widespread celebration of María Elvira Roca Barea’s book Imperiofobia y la leyenda negra and her subsequent career as a public intellectual. See María Elvira Roca Barea, Imperiofobia y leyenda negra: Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el Imperio español (Madrid: Siruela, 2016). For critical appraisals of the book and her work as an intellectual, see, for example, Miguel Martínez, “El imperio del extremo centro,” CTXT, 20 December 2017; José Luis Villacañas, Imperiofilia y el populismo nacional-católico (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2019); Sebastiaan Faber, “Roca Barea desembarca en los Estados Unidos,” CTXT, 8 October 2022. 71 Muñoz Molina, Todo lo que era sólido, 52–53. 72 Muñoz Molina, Todo lo que era sólido, 14. 73 Muñoz Molina, Todo lo que era sólido, 12, 14. 74 Noam Chomsky, “A Special Supplement: The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” The New York Review of Books 8.3 (February 23, 1967), 16. 75 This contrasts with other intellectuals in Spain, such as Santos Juliá, who shrug off the label of intellectual. See, for example, Guillermo Rodríguez, “Santos Juliá: ‘Fernando Savater y Almudena Grandes encarnan hoy la figura del intelectual,” Huffington Post, 3 May 2014. For an analysis of the role of historians as intellectuals in Spain, centered on Juliá, see Sebastiaan Faber, “The Debate about Spain’s Past,” 165–190.

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76 Emma Rodríguez, “Antonio Muñoz Molina: ‘Estamos viviendo momentos estimulantes y aterradores al mismo tiempo,’” Turia 101–102 (2012): 358. 77 Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 9. 78 Ana María Iglesia, “Antonio Muñoz Molina: ‘Nuestro mundo solo produce basura, ansiedad y ruido,’” El Confidencial, 4 March 2018. 79 Nowhere were these anxieties more obvious than in Muñoz Molina’s public dispute, in 2017, with The New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson. See Jon Lee Anderson, “The Increasingly Tense Standoff Over Catalonia’s Independence Referendum,” The New Yorker, 4 October 2017; Antonio Muñoz Molina, “En Francoland,” El País, 13 October 2017; Alejandro Torrús, “Jon Lee Anderson: ‘Detrás de las agresiones policiales del 1-O estaba la sombra de Franco,’” Público, 19 October 2017; Sebastiaan Faber, “¿España sigue siendo ‘Francolandia’?” Conversaciones sobre Historia, 18 April 2021. 80 Luisa Elena Delgado, La nación singular: Fantasías de la normalidad democrática Española (1996–2011) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2014), 160–162; Faber, Memory Battles, 147–154; Gabilondo, “State Melancholia.” 81 Fernando Aramburu, “Antonio Muñoz Molina: ‘La pereza expresiva es un pecado muy grave,’” El Cultural, 30 March 2018. 82 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 21; trans. modified. 83 For more on this debate, see Juan Pecourt Gracia, “Los intelectuales y el ‘espacio de opinión’ mediático: El caso de La desfachatez intelectual,” Historia y comunicación social 25.1 (2020): 265–274. 84 The newspapers Público and CTXT collaborated to host a lengthy forum on the topic, which included forty articles from journalists, intellectuals, and scholars across the Spanish public sphere. See “Medios, intelectuales y política: un debate largamente aplazado,” Espacio Público/CTXT, https://espacio-publico.com /un-debate-largamente-aplazado. 85 Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, La desfachatez intelectual: Escritores e intelectuales ante la política (Madrid: Catarata, 2016), 18. As Isabelle Touton notes in her review of this book, Sánchez-Cuenca exclusively analyzes the work of “men of letters.” See Isabelle Touton, “Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, La desfachatez intelectual. Escritores e intelectuales ante la política,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 46.2 (2016). 86 Sánchez-Cueca, La desfachatez intelectual, 24. 87 Sánchez-Cuenca, La desfachatez intelectual, 17. 88 See, for example, Javier Varela, La novela de España: Los intelectuales y el problema español (Madrid: Taurus, 1999); Morán, El cura y los mandarines; Víctor



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Lapuente, El regreso de los chamanes: Los charlatans que amenazan el bien común y los profesionales que pueden salvarnos (Barcelona: Península, 2015). 89 Sánchez-Cuenca, La desfachatez intelectual, 19, 24. 90 Sánchez-Cuenca, for instance, never grapples with the existence of numerous scholarly disciplines that approach the social and natural sciences using humanistic methods (e.g., political theory, science and technology studies, philosophy of science, etc.). 91 For a related criticism of Sánchez-Cuenca, see Sebastiaan Faber, “Cuando la crítica se confunde con los paseos: Apuntes de un polemista pasmado,” laU: Revista de cultura y pensamiento, 26 July 2016. 92 Corey Robin, “How Intellectuals Create a Public,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 January 2016, B10. 93 For accounts of the relationship between journalism and literature in Spain that fall into this division, see, for example, Fernando López Pan, “La oralidad fingida y la construcción del columnista como personaje: Dos estrategias para la construcción del ethos del columnista,” in Estrategias argumentativas en el discurso periodístico, ed. Concepción Martínez Pasamar (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), 193–220; María Jesús Casals Carro, “Juan José Millás: La realidad como ficción y la ficción como realidad (o cómo rebelarse contra los amos de lo real y del lenguaje) Análisis de Juan José Millás, columnista de El País,” Estudios sobre el mensaje periodístico 9 (2003): 63–124. 94 Encarna Alonso Valero, “Los artículos literarios de Antonio Muñoz Molina,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 805–806 (2017): 48. 95 Ulrich Winter, “Literatura, periodismo y ‘campo intelectual.’ Algunas observaciones acerca del columnismo de escritores a principios de los 90,” in Entre el ocio y el negocio: Industria editorial y literatura en la España de los 90, eds. José Manuel López de Abiada, Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, and Augusta López Bernasocchi (Madrid: Verbum, 2001), 297. 96 Sánchez-Cuenca, La desfachatez intelectual, 20. 3. Persuasive Literary Thought 1 Javier Marías, “Monoteísmo literario,” Diario 16, 16 November 1987. 2 Marías, “Monoteísmo literario.” 3 Javier Marías, “Capulleo de verano,” in Seré amado cuando falte (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999), 277. This column appeared in El Semanal on July 12, 1998. 4 Perhaps Camilo José Cela’s most notorious case of plagiarism was of María del Carmen Formoso’s book Carmen, Carmela, Carmiña in his own La cruz de San Andrés, which won the Planeta Prize in 1994. In 2010, the publishing house was found liable for more than half a million euros of damages. (Cela had died in

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13

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Notes to Pages 86–89

2002.) See in Antonio Muñoz Vico, “Una defensa convencida de la libertad de expresión,” in El copyright en cuestión: Diálogos sobre la propiedad intelectual, eds. Javier Torres Ripa and José Antonio Gómez Hernández (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 2011), 75–78. Javier Marías, Epilogue, Los dominios del lobo, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999), 331–332. Marías, “Monoteísmo literario”; capitalization in original. Matilde Penalonga, “Inexactitudes de Javier Marías,” Diario 16, 3 December 1987. Though I have not been able to confirm whether Villanueva is, in fact, the author of this letter to the editor, overwhelming circumstantial evidence suggests that he is. He has used the pseudonym Matilde Penalonga in the past to translate Galician poems from Uxío Novoneyra and Arcadio López-Casanova; the letter to the editor suggests its author is from Galicia, and Villanueva is from Galicia; and, in 2021, he wrote an op-ed in El País ironizing his use of a female name as a pseudonym. See Darío Villanueva, Curriculum Vitae, Real Academia Española (August 2020), 72, www.rae.es/sites/default/files/2020-10/CV%20 DARIO%20VILLANUEVA%202020%20%28002%29_0.pdf; Darío Villanueva, “Querida Matilde Penalonga, mi traductora de cabecera,” El País, 21 March 2021. Manuel Hidalgo, “Cela,” Diario 16, 17 November 1987. J. J. Armas Marcelo, “Hay que matar a Cela . . . ,” Diario 16, 17 December 1987. Howell Raines, “Exiled Soviet Poet Wins Nobel Prize in Literature,” New York Times, 23 October 1987, A10. Javier Marías, “Precisiones de Javier Marías,” Diario 16, 24 December 1987. Camilo José Cela, “Camilo José Cela à propos de la censure franquiste,” Interview by Olivier de Marliave. France Régions 3 Bordeaux, 4 February 1987. https://fresques.ina.fr/europe-des-cultures-fr/fiche-media/Europe00136/camilo -jose-cela-a-propos-de-la-censure-franquiste.html. For an account of Cela and changing censorship laws in early Francoism, see José B. Monleón, “Dictatorship and Publicity. Cela’s Pascual Duarte: The Monster Speaks,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 18.2 (1994): 257–273. Manuel Abellán’s 1980 book on literary censorship in Spain was one of the first to provide archival evidence supporting rumors of Cela’s ongoing collaboration with the regime on censorship well into the 1960s. See Manuel L. Abellán, Censura y creación literaria en España (1939–1976) (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1980), 113–114, 205–207; Manuel L. Abellán, “Fenómeno censorio y represión literaria,” in Censura y literaturas peninsulares, ed. Manuel L. Abellán (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), 22; see also Miguel Cruz Hernández, “Del deterioro al desmantelamiento: Los últimos años de la censura de libros,” in



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Censura y literaturas peninsulares, ed. Manuel L. Abellán (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), 45. 15 In 1979, the Francoist newspaper El Alcázar published Cela’s 1938 letter volunteering his services to the fascist censorship authorities. This was, apparently, in response to Cela’s decision years earlier to step down from the presidency of the Ateneo de Madrid, a decision he had made in protest of the execution of the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich in March 1974. Javier Villán, “Camilo José Cela, palabra de Nobel: Biografía,” ElMundo.es, 16 January 2002, https:// www.elmundo.es/especiales/2002/01/cultura/cela/biografia.html. See also Ian Gibson, Cela, el hombre que quiso ganar (Madrid: Aguilar, 2003), 78–83. In 1986, Julio Rodríguez Puértolas republished a transcription of Cela’s letter in his two-volume study of Spanish fascist literature, which would later be picked up by other scholars and journalists. See Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Literatura fascista española (Madrid: Akal, 1986), 584; see also 585–609. 16 Justino Sinova, La censura de prensa durante el franquismo [1989] (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2006), 137. 17 Sinova, La censura de prensa durante el franquismo, 138. 18 Sinova, La censura de prensa durante el franquismo, 137. 19 Javier Marías, El siglo [1983] (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1995), 9. 20 Marías, El siglo, 147. 21 Julián Marías, “Traducciones,” ABC, 20 December 2001. 22 Rafael Hidalgo Navarro, Julián Marías. Retrato de un filósofo enamorado (Madrid: Rialp, 2011), 106. 23 Hidalgo Navarro, Julián Marías, 105. 24 Gareth J. Wood, Javier Marías’s Debt to Translation: Sterne, Browne, Nabokov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 169. 25 These might include, for example, the short story, “Cuando fui mortal” (1993), which Wood references above, as well as Javier Marías, “Ser y no ser quien se es,” JavierMarias.es, August 2008, http://www.javiermarias.es/ESCRITOPOR/ serynoser.html; Javier Marías, “Sospechosas unanimidades,” El País Semanal, 15 July 2017; Giles Harvey, “Sins of the Fatherland,” New York Times Magazine, 4 August 2019, 22–27; José María Martí Font and Ángeles García, “Insultos de baja estofa,” El País, 15 March 1994; Javier Marías, “Entusiasmo por la censura,” El País Semanal, 27 February 2016. 26 Javier Marías, Así empieza lo malo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2014), 424; Javier Marías, Thus Bad Begins, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016), 396. 27 For Herralde’s version of events, see Jordi Gracia, ed., Los papeles de Herralde: Una historia de Anagrama, 1968–2000 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2021), 336–338,

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354–357. See also their exchange in El Mundo in October 1996 over the article “El baile del mundo,” by J. M. Plaza. “El juicio del traductor,” Vasos comunicantes: Revista de ACE Traductores 8 (Winter 1996): 106–108, https://vasos comunicantes.ace-traductores.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Vasos-08.pdf. 28 For a brief history of Alfaguara’s founding, see, for example, Mario Pedrazuela Fuentes, Alonso Zamora Vicente: Vida y filología (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2010), 339–350. 29 Núñez Díaz, “Las colaboraciones de Javier Marías,” 14. 30 His first op-ed in El País, which was on the writer Elias Canetti, appeared on December 24, 1978. See Javier Marías, “Cuestión de formas,” El País, 24 December 1978. Prior to this, Marías had also written a pair of essays for the paper’s “art and thought” supplement, which he included in his 1995 collection Vida del fantasma. See Javier Marías, “Thomas Bernhard, o el ritmo del torrente será siempre demente” and “El periplo de Elias Canetti,” in Vida del fantasma (Madrid: Aguilar, 1995), 341–345 and 347–350. 31 E. M. [Enrique Murillo], “Feliz madurez,” El País, “Libros” supplement no. 293 (26 May 1991), 2, cited in Pablo Núñez Díaz, “Las colaboraciones de Javier Marías en la prensa. Opinión y creación” (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2011), 59. 32 Maarten Steenmeijer, “Javier Marías, columnista: El otro, el mismo,” in El columnismo de escritores españoles (1975–2005), eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2006), 82; Núñez Díaz, “Las colaboraciones de Javier Marías,” 300; Karen Berg, Javier Marías’s Postmodern Praxis: Humor and Interplay between Reality and Fiction in His Novels and Essays (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008), 191 n.2. 33 Berg, Javier Marías’s Postmodern Praxis, 154. 34 Núñez Díaz, “Las colaboraciones de Javier Marías,” 300–304. 35 Javier Marías, Negra espalda de tiempo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998), 395; Javier Marías, Dark Back of Time, trans. Esther Allen (New York: Vintage International, 2013), 329. 36 Marías, Negra espalda de tiempo, 306; Marías, Dark Back of Time, 252. 37 Scholars have also contributed to this view, arguing, for instance, that “Marías creates narrators that, more than being actors or investigative journalists, are observers and contemplators.” See Heike Scharm, El tiempo y el ser en Javier Marías: El Ciclo de Oxford a luz de Bergson y Heidegger (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 195. 38 Domingo Ródenas de Moya, “Los riesgos y rasgos del contar. Una conversación con Javier Marías,” Ínsula 785–786 (2012): 46–47. 39 Javier Marías, “Volveremos,” El País, 28 December 1992.



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40 Santiago Bertrán, “La visión responsable de Javier Marías: Una narrativa entre el pensamiento literario de Julián Marías y la literatura como reconocimiento de Marce Proust,” Artes del ensayo: Revista internacional sobre el ensayo hispánico 3 (2019): 216. 41 Cited in Santiago Bertrán Pérez, “El pensamiento literario mariesco y la restitución filosófica de lo real,” Quimera: Revista de literatura 424 (2019): 30. 42 Cited in Bertrán, “La visión responsible,” 220, 222. 43 Julián Marías, “España y el pensamiento,” El País, 17 July 1979. 44 Javier Marías, “Una invitación,” Vuelta 196 (March 1993): 63. 45 Javier Marías, “Contar el misterio,” in El hombre que parecía no querer nada, ed. Elide Pittarello (Madrid: Espasa, 1996), 459; emphasis in original. 46 Javier Marías, “Una pobre cerilla,” El País, 14 December 1997. 47 Paul Ingendaay, “Javier Marías,” BOMB 73 (Fall 2000): 84–85. 48 Ingendaay, “Javier Marías,” 85. 49 See, for instance, David K. Herzberger, “Knowledge and Transcendence: Javier Marías on Writing and Storytelling,” Anales de la literatura contemporánea española 41.4 (2016): 204–205; Gonzalo Broto Noguerol, “Javier Marías: La acción del pensamiento,” in Pensamiento literario español del siglo XX, 2, eds. Túa Blesa, Juan Carlos Pueo, Alfredo Saldaña, and Enric Sullà (Zaragoza: Anexos de Tropelías, 2008), 91–93; Marta Pérez-Carbonell, The Fictional World of Javier Marías: Language and Uncertainty (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 11, 16. 50 Maarten Steenmeijer, Introduction, El pensamiento literario de Javier Marías, ed. Maarten Steenmeijer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 9. 51 Initial work on Julián Marías’s concept of literary thought has been undertaken by the scholar Santiago Bertrán. See, for example, Bertrán, “La visión responsable de Javier Marías” and Bertrán Pérez, “El pensamiento literario mariesco.” 52 Herzberger, A Companion to Javier Marías, 37. Herzberger repeats a similar claim regarding literary thought in David K. Herzberger, “Ficción, referencialidad y estilo en la teoría de la novela de Javier Marías,” in El pensamiento literario de Javier Marías (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 33. 53 Wood, Javier Marías’s Debt to Translation, 107. 54 See, for example, Santiago Bertrán, “Perspectivismo y realidad radical en la literatura de Javier Marías, y el caso de la novela Corazón tan blanco,” Hispanic Research Journal 21.6 (2020): 697–718; Mihai Iacob, “La écfrasis auto/docuficcional en Tu rostro mañana de Javier Marías,” ILCEA 35 (2019), DOI: 10.4000/ ilcea.6117. 55 Ingendaay, “Javier Marías,” 85. 56 Marías, “Volveremos.” 57 Marías, “Una pobre cerilla.”

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58 Gontzal Díez, “Javier Marías: ‘Un escritor sabe más que sus críticos casi siempre,’” La Verdad de Murcia, 28 October 2008. 59 See Alexis Grohmann, “La literatura como paradoja,” in Allí donde uno diría que ya no puede haber nada: Tu rostro mañana de Javier Marías, eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 167; Isabel Cuñado, “Tu rostro mañana y la ética de la memoria,” in Allí donde uno diría que ya no puede haber nada: Tu rostro mañana de Javier Marías, eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 246; Sebastiaan Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018), 183–184. 60 Jordi Gracia, “Javier Marías o pensar por novelas,” Claves de razón práctica 177 (2007): 77. 61 Pérez-Carbonell, The Fictional World of Javier Marías, 24. 62 Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War, 189. 63 Marías, “Contar el misterio,” 459. 64 Javier Marías, “El artículo más iluso,” El País, 26 June 1999. 65 Eduardo López-Aranguren, “Réplicas,” El País, 3 July 1999. 66 López-Aranguren, “Réplicas.” 67 Antonio Astorga, “Aranguren: ‘El régimen franquista me obligó a informar sobre intelectuales en el exilio,” ABC, 21 August 1993, 42. 68 Javier Marías, “Con desagrado respondo,” El País, 10 July 1999. 69 Marías, “Con desagrado respondo.” 70 See Maarten Steenmeijer, “El tabú del franquismo vivido en la narrativa de Mendoza, Marías y Muñoz Molina,” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 147–149. 71 Mauro Armiño, “En el nombre del padre: Javier Marías, Aranguren y el franquismo,” El Siglo de Europa 375 (19–25 July 1999): 49–50; César Alonso de los Ríos, La verdad sobre Tierno Galván (Madrid: Anaya & Mario Muchnik, 1997). 72 Giles Tremlett, “Spanish Novelist Spied for Franco’s Regime,” The Guardian, 25 September 2004. The difference between these documents and the revelations by Manuel Abellán in 1980 was that Ysàs uncovered a paper trail of payments to Cela, whereas previous research had only managed to find correspondence between Cela and members of the Franco government. 73 For more on this commission, see Gustavo Guerrero, Historia de un encargo: “La catira” de Camilo José Cela. Literatura, ideología y diplomacia en tiempos de la Hispanidad (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2008). 74 Isaac Rosa, El vano ayer (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2004), 307; the reproduction of Cela’s letter appears on 173–174.

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Benjamín Prado, Mala gente que camina (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2006). Javier Marías, “Nada importa,” El País, 17 April 1988. Marías, “Nada importa”; emphasis in original. On the changing appraisal of Spanish intellectuals after the transition to democracy, see Javier Muñoz Soro, “Los intelectuales en España, de la dictadura a la democracia (1939–1986),” Bulletin d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Espagne 50 (2016): 15–32. 79 Gregorio Morán, “‘Abuelo, ¿tú fuiste un nazi bueno?’” La Vanguardia, 18 September 1999, 25. This was the second of a two-part column responding to the debate over the Marías article. For the first column, see Gregorio Morán, “Las interferencias de la memoria familiar (I),” La Vanguardia, 11 September 1999, 23. 80 See, for example, Sebastiaan Faber, “La irresponsabilidad del novelista. Javier Marías, Tu rostro mañana y el debate sobre la memoria histórica,” in Allí donde uno diría que ya no puede haber nada: Tu rostro mañana de Javier Marías, eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 203–233; Isabel Cuñado, El espectro de la herencia. La narrativa de Javier Marías (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 151–164; Antonio Gómez LópezQuiñones, La guerra persistente. Memoria, violencia y utopía: representaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil Española (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2006), 83–92; José Martínez Rubio, Las formas de la verdad. Investi­ gación, docuficción y memoria en la novela hispánica (2000–2015) (Barcelona: Anthropos–UNAM-Iztapalapa, 2015), 73; and Sara J. Brenneis, Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2014), 171–204. 81 For a more extended discussion of the historical memory movement, see Chapter 4. 82 On the history of political corruption during this period, see Paul Preston, A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain (New York: Liveright, 2020), 471–508. 83 Javier Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 1 Fiebre y lanza (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002), 356–357; Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Volume One, Fever and Spear (New York: New Directions, 2005), 289, trans. modified. 84 Javier Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 2 Baile y sueño (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2004), 303; Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Volume Two, Dance and Dream, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: New Directions, 2006), 250. 85 Marías, Tu rostro mañana 2, 308; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2, 253. 86 Marías, Tu rostro mañana 1, 357; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1, 289. 87 Marías, Tu rostro mañana 1, 356; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1, 288, trans. modified.

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Notes to Pages 111–115

88 Marías, Tu rostro mañana 2, 124; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2, 95. 89 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 2, 308; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2, 253–254, trans. modified. 90 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 1, 224; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1, 179. 91 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 2, 302; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2, 249–50, trans. modified. 92 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 1, 192–224; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1, 153–179. 93 See Luis Velasco Martínez, “Fascistización y desfascistización en la universidad española: El caso de Carlos Alonso del Real,” conference paper, Col.loqui Identitats feixistes. Feixistització i desfeixistitzaió a Espanya. 11–12 April 2013, Facultat de Filosofía i Lletres, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. 94 Julián Marías, Una vida persistente. Memorias 1 (1914–1951) (Madrid: Alianza, 1988), 275–276. 95 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 1, 195; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1, 155. 96 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 2, 311; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2, 256–257. 97 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 1, 195; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1, 155, trans. modified. 98 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 2, 299; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2, 247, trans. modified. 99 Javier Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 3 Veneno y sombra y adios (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2007), 270; Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Volume Three, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: New Directions, 2009), 206; Marías, Tu rostro mañana 1, 297; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1, 241, trans. modified. 100 This view has been perhaps most influentially and persuasively articulated by Alexis Grohmann. See Grohmann, “La literatura como paradoja.” For a similar account of paradox in Marías, articulated using different terms, see Ilse Logie, “Javier Marias: Tu rostro manana o la redención a través de la escritura,” in Allí donde uno diría que ya no puede haber nada: Tu rostro mañana de Javier Marías, eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 171–188; and Gonzalo Navajas, “Tu rostro mañana: Teoría del saber de la narración,” in Allí donde uno diría que ya no puede haber nada: Tu rostro mañana de Javier Marías, eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 149–160. 101 Edmundo Paz Soldán, “Javier Marías: literatura en cámara lenta,” in Allí donde uno diría que ya no puede haber nada: Tu rostro mañana de Javier Marías, eds. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 58–59. 102 Alexis Grohmann, Literatura y errabundia (Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina y Rosa Montero) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 68; Marta Pérez-Carbonell, The Fictional World of Javier Marías, 40.



Notes to Pages 115–117

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103 Marta Pérez-Carbonell, The Fictional World of Javier Marías, 14–15. 104 Scharm, El tiempo y el ser en Javier Marías, 167. 105 On Marías’s digressive approach, see Alexis Grohmann, “Roving with a Compass: Digression, the Novel and the Creative Imagination in Javier Marías,” in Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald, eds. Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 181– 192; Sandra Navarro Gil, “Una aproximación al estilo literario de Javier Marías,” Revista de Filología 22 (2004): 187–193; Carmen María López López, El discurso interior en las novelas de Javier Marías: Los ojos de la mente (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 74–80. 106 Marías, Tu rostro mañana: 2, 195–350; Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2, 156–291. This scene, sometimes known as “the episode of the sword,” has received significant attention. See, for example, Héctor Brioso Santos and Máximo Brioso Sánchez, “Un episodio de Javier Marías: La espada de Tupra en Tu rostro mañana,” Philologia Hispalenses 27.1–2 (2013): 71–93; Antonio Candeloro, “La espada de Tupra: El miedo y la violencia en Tu rostro mañana de Javier Marías,” Quimera: Revista de literatura 424 (2019): 17–21; Iacob, “La écfrasis auto/ docuficcional.” 107 Alexis Grohmann, Coming into One’s Own: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 243. 108 Fernando Larraz, El monopolio de la palabra. El exilio intelectual en la España franquista (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009), 129. 109 Larraz, El monopolio de la palabra, 131. 110 Larraz, El monopolio de la palabra, 130. 111 Larraz, El monopolio de la palabra, 134 n.5, 137 n.7. 112 “Javier Marías critica el feminismo moderno y la poesía de Gloria Fuertes,” 20minutos.es, 25 June 2017; “Críticas a Javier Marías por un artículo en el que critica la ‘barra libre’ de las víctimas de abusos sexuales,” Público.es, 12 February 2018; Dani Cabezas, “Carta abierta a Javier Marías de un ‘ciclista fanático,’” Ciclosfera.com, 25 October 2016. 113 Carlos Prieto, “Quique Peinado: ‘Los columnistas somos el cáncer del periodismo español,’” El Confidencial, 16 January 2017. See, also, Alberto Olmos, “¿Cuánta gente leía a Umbral? ¿Alguien lee a Marías? El columnismo está acabado,” El Confidencial, 17 January 2017. 114 Several controversies over op-eds on the #MeToo movement and environmentalism have been cited above. For others, see, for instance, Gabriela Wiener, “Javier sin Marías,” eldiario.es, 20 February 2018; Saila Marcos, “Javier Marías, adalid de la literatura y polemista sin Twitter,” InfoLibre, 6 September 2017; “Actores y actrices responden indignados a Javier Marías por sus comentarios sobre el teatro,” 20minutos.es, 24 January 2017; and Julián Moreiro, Escritores

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Notes to Pages 119–120 a la greña: Envidias, enemistades y trifulcas literarias (Madrid: Editorial EDAF, 2014), 151–161. 4. Autofiction and the Uses of History

1 The following is an attempt to highlight the most relevant pieces in the debate. Francisco Rico, “Teoría y realidad de la ley contra el fumador,” El País, 11 January 2011; Milagros Pérez Oliva, “La impostura de un fumador,” El País, 16 January 2011; Javier Cercas, “Adiós, muchachos,” El País, 23 January 2011; Arcadi Espada, “El Milikito,” El Mundo, 25 January 2011; Javier Cercas, “Rico, al paredón,” El País, 13 February 2011; Santiago González, “Cercas insiste,” El Mundo, 15 February 2011; Arcadi Espada, “Gato al agua,” El Mundo, 15 February 2011; Lluís Bassets, “Mentirosos,” El País, 16 February 2011; David Trueba, “Daño,” El País, 16 February 2011; Arcadi Espada, “De vuelta al burdel,” El Mundo, 17 February 2011; Arcadi Espada, “Un lupanar en Arganzuela,” El Mundo, 17 February 2011; Milagros Pérez Oliva, “En defensa de Cercas y de la verdad,” El País, 20 February 2011; Javier Cercas, “Cercas responde a la Defensora del Lector,” El País, 21 February 2011. 2 Pau Luque, Las cosas como son y otras fantasías: Moral, imaginación y arte narrativo (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2020), 175. 3 “El Gabinete: Arcadi Espada vs. Javier Cercas,” Julia en la Onda, Onda Cero, 16 February 2011. www.ondacero.es/programas/julia-en-la-onda/audios-podcast /el-gabinete/gabinete-arcadi-espada-javier-cercas_201102165546b3ea0cf2c2 fca20e47a2.html. 4 “Pregunta de la semana: ¿Dónde están los límites de la ficción?” El Ojo Crítico, Radio Nacional Española, 17 February 2011. https://blog.rtve.es/elojo/2011/02 /pregunta-de-la-semana-dónde-están-los-l%C3%ADmites-de-la-ficción.html. 5 Álvaro Cortina, “Acerca de Arcadi,” GQ España, 22 February 2011. 6 Alberto Moreno, “Arcadi Espada, Hombre GQ de la Semana,” GQ España, 23 February 2011. 7 Mariana Urquijo Reguera, “Experimentos con la verdad: Cercas y Espada,” El Imparcial, 26 February 2011. 8 Javier Cercas, interview by Gemma Nierga, La Ventana, Cadena SER, 16 February 2011. https://cadenaser.com/ser/2011/02/16/cultura/1297815430 _850215.html. 9 On the controversy between Cercas and Espada, see José Manuel Ruiz Martínez, “Verdad ficcional frente a verdad factual o Poesía frente a Historia. Una polémica entre Javier Cercas y Arcadi Espada,” in La memoria novelada II. Ficcionalización, documentalismo y lugares de memoria en la narrativa memorialista



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española, eds. Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez and Diana González Martín (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 139–154; and Federico Gerhardt, “Entre Espada y Cercas: Los límites de la literature en prensa,” in Hispanismos del mundo. Diálogos y debates en (y desde) el Sur. Anexo digital, sección III, ed. Leonardo Funes (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2016), 185–193. 10 Arcadi Espada, Diarios (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2002), 53–54, 79. 11 Javier Cercas, “Relatos reales,” Quimera 263–264 (November 2005): 93. 12 The literary magazine Letras Libres published a history of their “fights” dating back to 2002. See Yaiza Santos, “Espada-Cercas, historia de una pelea,” Letras Libres, 23 February 2011. 13 Javier Cercas, Relatos reales (Barcelona: El Acantilado, 2000), 16. 14 See, for example, Samuel Amago, True Lies: Narrative Self-Consciousness in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 144–165; Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones, La guerra persistente: Memoria, violencia y utopía: representaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2006); and Javier Lluch Prats, “La dimensión metaficcional en la narrativa de Javier Cercas,” in Scrittura e conflitto: Atti del XXII Convegno, eds. Antonella Cancellier, Maria Caterina Ruta, and Laura Silvestri (Madrid: Instituto Cervantes-AISPI, 2004), 1:293–306. 15 Writing in the 1980s, Robert Spires traced the metafictional tradition from late nineteenth-century Realism to the postwar Spanish novel. See Robert C. Spires, Beyond the Metafictional Mode: Directions in the Modern Spanish Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984). Some have even attempted to trace this history back to Cervantes. For a critical appraisal, see Nicolas Spadaccini, “Cervantes and the Question of Metafiction,” Vanderbilt e-Journal of LusoHispanic Studies 2 (2005). DOI:10.15695/vejlhs.v2i0.3176. 16 Spires, Beyond the Metafictional Mode, 76. 17 For accounts of this body of literature that draw on metafictional themes— though sometimes taking issue with the term itself—see Kathryn Everly, History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2010); and Sara J. Brenneis, Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2014). 18 Amago, True Lies, 147. 19 For example, take his claim in Relatos reales that “it is impossible to transcribe reality verbatim without betraying it,” which he follows up with “this of course doesn’t amount to ignoring the fundamental difference that separates journalism and fiction.” He then never explains what he thinks this fundamental difference is. See Cercas, Relatos reales, 16–17.

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Notes to Pages 124–126

20 I am referring here to a significant body of scholarship in the 1990s and 2000s— and even to this day—that assumes that “historiographic metafiction” and other forms of self-reflexive literary writing about factual events “make their readers question their own (and by implication others’) interpretations.” Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 180; emphasis in original. 21 Marjorie Worthington, The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 92–124; Thomas Carrier-Lafleur, Une Philosophie du «temps à l’état pur». L’Autofiction chez Proust et Jutra (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010); Houman Barekat, “Autofiction’s First Boom Was in Turn-of-the-Century Japan,” Boston Review, 14 May 2021. 22 Annabel Kim, “Autofiction Infiltrated: Anne Garréta’s Pas un jour,” PMLA 133.3 (2018): 560; emphases in original. 23 For a concise account of the theoretical stakes involved in the autofiction debate, see Kim, “Autofiction Infiltrated,” 559–564. 24 Scholars often spend significant time defining the term and retracing its origins to Doubrovsky. One can see this in some of the contributions to the most important scholarly volumes on autofiction in each of these national literatures. See, for example, Mounir Laouyen, ed., Les Nouvelles Autobiographies/New Autobiographies, special issue of L’Esprit créateur 42.4 (2002); Hywel Dix, Autofiction in English (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Martina WagnerEgelhaaf, ed., Auto(r)fiktion: Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013); and Ana Casas, ed., La autoficción. Reflexiones teóricas (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2012). 25 See, for example, Ricarda Menn, “Unpicked and Remade: Creative Imperatives in John Burnside’s Autofictions,” in Autofiction in English, ed. Hywel Dix (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 163–178; Ricarda Menn and Melissa Schuh, “The Autofictional in Serial, Literary Works,” in The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms, eds. Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Ana Casas, ed., El autor a escena: Intermedialidad y autoficción (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2017); and Arne De Boever, “What Is ‘the’ Neoliberal Novel? Neoliberalism, Finance, and Biopolitics,” in New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, eds. Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 157–174. 26 See Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). For an account of the origins and development of autofiction in France, see E. H. Jones, “Autofiction: A Brief History of



Notes to Pages 126–129

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a Neologism,” in Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography, and Literature, ed. Richard Bradford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 174–184. 27 Vera Toro, “Soy simultáneo”: El concepto poetológico de la autoficción en la narrativa hispánica (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2017), 97–101, 243–270. 28 Indeed, some of these works have already been read as works of autofiction. See, for example, Catherine Orsini-Saillet, “Del pacto referencial a la ficción: Soldados de Salamina de Javier Cercas,” in La autoficción. Reflexiones teóricas, ed. Ana Casas (Madrid: ARCO/LIBROS, 2012), 283–303; José Antonio Vila Sánchez, “La autoficción como dialéctica entre lo histórico y lo biográfico en la obra de Javier Cercas,” Pasavento: Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 3.1 (2015): 123– 135; Salvador Gómez Barranco, “La autoficción frente a las cuestiones de memoria en literatura: Soldados de Salamina de Javier Cercas,” LL Journal 10.1 (2015), https://lljournal.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015-1-gomez-barranco-texto/; Sebastiaan Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018), 192–205; Teresa Gómez Trueba, ‘Esa bestia omnívora que es el yo’: El uso de la autoficción en la obra narrativa de Javier Cercas,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 86.1 (2009): 67–83; or, Lia Ogno, “Novela y relato real en Javier Cercas,” Monteagudo 24 (2019): 113–126. 29 On the complex political dimensions of autobiography, see Nolan Bennett, The Claims of Experience: Autobiography and American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 30 Worthington, Story of “Me,” 1–2. 31 Siddharth Srikanth, “Fictionality and Autofiction,” Style 53.3 (2019): 353. 32 Ana Casas, “El simulacro del yo: La autoficción en la narrativa actual,” in La autoficción. Reflexiones teóricas, ed. Ana Casas (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2012), 23. 33 Worthington, Story of “Me,” 5. 34 Patricia López-Gay, Ficciones de verdad. Archivo y narrativas de vida (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vertuert, 2020), 29. 35 Consider, for instance, the intimately related and often overlapping subgenre of autotheory. See Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021). 36 Arcadi Espada, “Los que filtran,” El País, 13 January 1993; Arcadi Espada, “Catalanes,” El País, 31 December 1992. Espada’s first article for the paper, on the Catalan journalist and writer Josep Pla, appeared in the “Culture” section on November 20, 1991. See Arcadi Espada, “Una obra incompleta,” El País, 20 November 1991. 37 Javier Cercas, “¡Viva Bolaño!” El País, 11 February 1998. Also included in Cercas, Relatos reales, 79–82.

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Notes to Pages 130–133

38 Arcadi Espada, “Devolución de Dalí,” El País, 17 July 1998. 39 Javier Cercas, “Una voz propia,” El País, 2 March 1999. It is also included in Cercas, Relatos reales, 119–122. 40 Javier Cercas, Relatos reales (Barcelona: El Acantilado, 2000), 12. 41 There is a significant body of scholarship attempting to unpack what Cercas means by the term relato real. Among the most persuasive accounts are William Viestenz, “Anatomía de un instante by Javier Cercas: The Novel in its Embryonic State,” Hispanic Research Journal 15.6 (2014): 547–564; Andrew A. Anderson, “The Idiosyncratic Narrator in Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina,” Neophilologus 98 (2014): 599–615; Samuel Amago, True Lies, 144–165; and Mercedes Juliá, “Juegos seductores en los relatos ‘reales’ de Javier Cercas (Soldados de Salamina, La velocidad de la luz y Anatomía de un instante),” in La novela histórica española contemporánea: Novedades y transformaciones (del 98 al nuevo milenio), ed. Carmen García de la Rasilla (Valladolid: Verdelís, 2016), 57– 76. Staying within the confines of Cercas’s own terminology, however, prevents critics from taking a more panoramic view that includes his work as a public intellectual. For this reason, I opt for the term autofiction. 42 Javier Cercas, “Relatos reales,” Quimera 263–264 (November 2005): 92. 43 Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2001), 68; Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, trans. Anne McLean (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), 57. 44 Cercas, Relatos reales, 16. 45 Cercas, Relatos reales, 17. 46 Cercas, Relatos reales, 16. 47 Cercas, Relatos reales, 16. 48 Cercas, Relatos reales, 16. 49 Cercas himself cites American New Journalists regularly in his writing. In Soldados de Salamina, he writes, “Bolaño repeated his praise for my interview, he talked about Capote and Mailer.” Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 150; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 145. 50 Not everyone within the historical memory movement has welcomed Cercas with open arms, including, most notably, ARMH founder Emilio Silva and anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz. See, for example, Sebastiaan Faber, “An Underground Landscape of Terror,” The Volunteer, 11 June 2015; and Juan Antonio Cortés Avellano, “Javier Cercas contra la memoria histórica,” Badajoz y la Guerra (in) Civil, 19 November 2014, https://badajozylaguerraincivil.blogspot .com/2014/11/javier-cercas-contra-la-memoria.html. 51 Mario Vargas Llosa, “El sueño de los héroes,” El País, 2 September 2001. Littérature engagée refers to the term coined by Jean-Paul Sartre for politically committed literature. 52 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 23; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 10.



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53 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 22; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 8. 54 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 22; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 8. 55 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 45; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 33. 56 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 69; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 58. 57 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 168; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 163–164. 58 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 172; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 167–168. 59 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 79; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 69. 60 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 81, 82; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 71, 72. 61 Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 136; Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 130. 62 For ethnographies of the historical memory movement, see, for example, Nicole Iturriaga, Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022); Zahira AragüeteToribio, Producing History in Spanish Civil War Exhumations: From the Archive to the Grave (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Francisco Ferrándiz, “Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in 21st-century Spain,” American Ethnologist 40.1 (2013): 38–54. 63 Natalia Junquera, “La ‘voladura de la Transición’ y otros falsos mitos sobre la memoria histórica,” El País, 29 June 2019. 64 Gregorio Morán, “Soldadito de plomo en Salamina,” La Vanguardia, 29 March 2003, 32. 65 Morán, “Soldadito de plomo.” 66 Morán, “Soldadito de plomo.” 67 Morán, “Soldadito de plomo.” 68 Javier Cercas, “La falsificación de la historia,” La Vanguardia, 5 April 2003, 47. 69 Cercas, “La falsificación de la historia.” 70 Cercas, “La falsificación de la historia.” 71 Cercas, “La falsificación de la historia.” 72 Cercas, “La falsificación de la historia.” 73 Ricardo Cayuela Gally, “Anatomía de un instante, de Javier Cercas,” Letras Libres, 31 October 2009. 74 Javier Cercas, Anatomía de un instante (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2009), back cover. 75 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 16; Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination, trans. Anne McLean (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 6. 76 Javier Cercas, El monarca de las sombras (Barcelona: Literatura Random House, 2017), 13–16; Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead: A Nonfiction Novel, trans. Anne McLean (New York: Vintage, 2020), 5–8. 77 Javier Cercas, “La tercera verdad,” El País, 25 June 2011. 78 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 43; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 31.

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Notes to Pages 142–152

79 For a good summary of this revisionist history, see Chase Madar, “23-F,” London Review of Books 33.17 (8 September 2011), 30–31. 80 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 16; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 6–7, trans. modified. 81 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 57, see also 67; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 44, trans. modified. 82 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 105; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 88. 83 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 184, see also 160, 186, 208; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 160, see also 162, 178, 194. 84 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 142; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 121, trans. modified. 85 See, for example, Paul Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (London: Routledge, 1986); Nigel Townson, ed., Spain Transformed: The Franco Dictatorship, 1959–1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer, ed., From Franco to Freedom: The Roots of the Transition to Democracy in Spain, 1962–1982 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2019). 86 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 350; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 304. 87 See, for example, Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, 14–67. 88 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 347; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 302, trans. modified. 89 See, for example, Bécquer Seguín, “The Many Crimes of Jesús Gil,” Howler 11 (2016): 98–107. 90 Bonifacio de la Cuadra, “La trama civil del 23-F,” El País, 25 February 2011. 91 Pilar Cernuda, Fernando Jáuregui, and Miguel Ángel Menéndez, 23-F. La conjura de los necios (Madrid: Foca, 2011), 226–227, cited in Javier Cercas, “Respuesta a De la Cuadra,” El País, 26 February 2011. 92 Fernando Jáuregui, “Respuesta a Javier Cercas,” El País, 1 March 2011. 93 Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, 455; Cercas, Anatomy of a Moment, 398. 94 Although Rico contributed his first piece to El País in 1981—an anniversary article on the Spanish Renaissance humanist Antonio de Nebrija—it would not be until the late 1990s that he would contribute regularly to the newspaper. 95 Rico appears by name in Marías’s Tu rostro mañana (2002–2007), Los enamoramientos (2011), and Así empieza lo malo (2014) as well as in Cercas’s El vientre de la ballena (1997). Rico also appears to have been the inspiration behind the characters Del Diestro in Todas las almas (1988) and “profesor Villalobos” and Corazón tan blanco (1992), both by Marías. 96 Beatriz Castrillo, “El libro de ‘El Quijote’ que leyeron Leonor y Sofía, un regalo que recibieron sus padres,” Hola.com, 24 April 2020. 97 Francisco Rico, “Teoría y realidad de la ley contra el fumador,” El País, 11 January 2011.



Notes to Pages 152–158

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98 Milagros Pérez Oliva, “La imposture de un fumador,” El País, 16 January 2011. 99 Javier Cercas, “Rico, al paredón,” El País, 13 February 2011. 100 See Emilia Landaluce, “Francisco Rico: ‘Gil de Biedma nunca pensó que cogería sida,’” El Mundo, 30 July 2018. 101 Arcadi Espada, “Gato al agua,” El Mundo, 15 February 2011. 102 Vera Gutiérrez, “Arcadi Espada lanza el bulo de que Cercas fue detenido en un prostíbulo,” El País, 16 February 2011; Pedro Vallín, “Arcadi Espada acude a una calumnia sexual para denigrar a Javier Cercas,” La Vanguardia, 17 February 2011. 103 Àlex Gutiérrez, “Cercas estudia denunciar Arcadi Espada per fer córrer que l’havien detingut en un bordell,” Ara, 17 February 2011. 104 David Palomo, “Todos los charcos que pisa Arcadi Espada, el periodista a contracorriente,” El Español, 23 September 2018. For a thorough analysis of the debate, see Pau Luque, Las cosas como son y otras fantasías: Moral, imaginación y arte narrativo (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2020), 165–175. 105 Espada, Diarios, 80. 106 Cercas, “Relatos reales,” 92; África Prado, “Javier Cercas: ‘Prescindir de la ficción es como escribir con una mano atada a la espalda,’” Levante-EMV, 26 March 2012; Javier Cercas, “Observatorio Cervantes - Harvard. Literatura e historia. Javier Cercas,” Observatorio (Instituto Cervantes at Harvard), July 20, 2015, video, 16:25, https://youtu.be/uEGeIQ2_nNQ. 107 See, for example, Javier Cercas, “Plumas en el viento,” El País, 5 May 2019. For the context surrounding this piece by Cercas, see Sebastiaan Faber, “Pasado de rosca. Sobre Javier Cercas y Francisco Espinosa,” Conversación sobre la Historia, 12 May 2019. 108 Arcadi Espada, “De vuelta del burdel,” El Mundo, 17 February 2011. 109 Félix de Azúa, “Carta a Javier Cercas,” Letras Libres, 31 May 2002. 5. The New Novel of Ideas 1 As María Cruz Seoane and Susana Sueiro write, during his editorship from 1993 to 2006, “Jesús Ceberio has made a newspaper with more opinion, introducing columns from regular contributors in different sections, that with regularity and fixed space express an opinion that is more closely tied to current affairs than what was until then published exclusively, with few exceptions, in the ‘tribuna libre’ section.” See María Cruz Seoane and Susana Sueiro, Una historia de El País y del Grupo Prisa (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 2004), 575. 2 “Tabucchi, Sepúlveda, Cabrera y Grandes, nuevos articulistas de ‘El País Semanal,’” El País, 31 January 1998, 31; “‘El País Semanal’ cambia de formato y contenidos,” El País, 25 September 1998, 41.

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Notes to Pages 158–161

3 Seoane and Sueiro, Una historia de El País, 486. 4 For an official history of the women who worked for El País, see “Tres generaciones de mujeres (y un periódico),” S Moda, 27 February 2016. 5 Almudena Grandes, “El perfil de los nuevos iconos de la opinión,” 15 December 2014, Congreso ‘Artículo femenino singular: la mujer en la historia del columnismo español,’ Fundación Manuel Alcántara, Málaga, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=HfKkYOPRwsQ. 6 For a discussion of El País’s lack of gender parity in column writing, see Chapter 1. 7 See Soledad Gallego-Díaz, “Hemos incumplido la ley,” El País, 5 December 1993. For how the ombudsman column connects to the op-ed column, see Chapter 1. 8 María Jesús Casals Carro, “La opinión en la prensa: Retrato de España en el primer año del siglo XXI,” Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico 10 (2004): 57. 9 All the statistics in this paragraph are from Casals Carro, “La opinión en la prensa,” 56–58. 10 Though regular columnist generally refers to someone who publishes at least one column per week, not all regular columnists publish the same number of columns per week, and many publish more than the one- or two-columns-perweek standard at many American newspapers. 11 Casals Carro, “La opinión en la prensa,” 57. 12 Almudena Grandes, “Hola,” El País, 7 January 2008. 13 Almudena Grandes, “El progreso,” El País, 14 January 2008. 14 See Almudena Grandes, “La Historia,” El País, 16 June 2008; and Almudena Grandes, “Pasos,” El País, 1 September 2008; Almudena Grandes, “La oportunidad,” El País, 28 July 2008. 15 See, for example, “Entrevista Digital: Entrevista con Almudena Grandes,” El País, 21 February 2002; “Almudena Grandes: “Yo no lidero ninguna mafia literaria,” 20 Minutos, 1 March 2007, https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/206585/0/ almudena/grandes/encuentro/. 16 See María de la Paz Aguilera Gamero, “Mercado de Barceló (1999–2002): Periodismo y literatura en Almudena Grandes,” Alfinge 22 (2010): 9–45. 17 On the discourse of Spain being the eighth economic power, see Germán Labrador Méndez, “Lo que en España no ha habido: La lógica normalizadora de la cultura postfranquista en la actual crisis,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 69.2 (2016): 171–172. 18 See Concepción Bados Ciria, “Las escritoras en la prensa: La columna de opinión como expression feminista cultural,” Revista Historia de las Mujeres 148 (2013): 12–15. 19 Almudena Grandes, “La hermana de Braulio,” El País Semanal, 17 October 2004.



Notes to Pages 162–165

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20 For the political and cultural history of the Madrid bombings, see Jill Robbins, Poetry and Crisis: Cultural Politics and Citizenship in the Wake of the Madrid Bombings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020); Fernando Reinares, AlQaeda’s Revenge: The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings (Washington, DC, and New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Columbia University Press, 2016). 21 In the United States, the phrase “show, don’t tell” dominates everything from newspaper reporting manuals to creative writing workshops. The same is true in Spain. For the impact of “show don’t tell” in US literature and journalism, see, for example, Marc McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 77–179, 234– 235; Doug Underwood, The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction: Journalists as Genre Benders in Literary History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 82–83. For its impact on Spanish literature and journalism, see, for example, Sergio C. Fanjul, “A escribir también se aprende,” El País, 11 October 2013; Enrique Páez, Escribir. Manual de técnicas narrativas (Madrid: Ediciones SM, 2005); Sonia F. Parratt, Introducción al reportaje: Antecedents, actualidad y perspectivas (Santiago: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Publicacions, 2003). 22 See Almudena Grandes, “Elegía,” El País, 28 November 2016; Almudena Grandes, “Un maestro vivo,” El País Semanal, 15 March 2020; Almudena Grandes, “Gabo, aquel 7 de mayo,” El País, 20 April 2014. 23 See Almudena Grandes, “Elogio de la literatura,” El País Semanal, 2 June 2013. 24 See Almudena Grandes, “Desconcierto,” El País, 13 March 2017. 25 See Harriet S. Turner, “Benito Pérez Galdós,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spanish Literature, ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 392–409. 26 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 95. 27 See Almudena Grandes, “Tristana, el cocido y yo,” El País, 19 February 2017; Almudena Grandes, “¡Viva Galdós!” El País, 13 May 2018. 28 Almudena Grandes, “Galdós para entender la España de hoy,” El País, 4 January 2020. 29 Grandes, “Galdós para entender la España de hoy.” 30 See Rafael Narbona, “El amigo Galdós,” Revista de Libros, 20 September 2020; Clara Morales, “El debate sobre Galdós: Compromiso, realismo y prestigio,” InfoLibre, 19 February 2020; Javier Carrasco, “Galdós y lo mejor de España,” Valencia Plaza, 9 March 2020; Antonio Avedaño, “Pérez Galdós, Muñoz Molina, Javier Cercas,” El Plural Andalucía, 15 February 2020. 31 Javier Cercas, “Galdós,” El País Semanal, 9 February 2020. 32 Cercas, “Galdós.”

274

Notes to Pages 165–167

33 Cercas, “Galdós.” 34 On the nineteenth-century novela de tesis, see Ignacio Javier López, La novela ideológica (1875–1880): La literatura de ideas en la España de la Restauración (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 2014); Ignacio Javier López, “Revolución, Restauración y novela de tesis,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 52.1 (1999): 5–23; Brian John Dendle, “La novela española de tesis religiosa: De Unamuno a Miró,” Anales de filología hispánica 4 (1988–1989): 15–26; Joan Oleza, “La genesis del Realismo y la novela de tesis,” in Historia de la literatura española, vol. 9 (Siglo XIX [II]), ed. Leonardo Romero Tobar (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1998), 410–435; Toni Dorca, “Reformulando la poética de la novela española del XIX: El caso del relato de tesis,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 50.2 (1997): 266–279. 35 Rafael García Pérez, “El diminutivo en la novela de tesis: el ejemplo de Doña Perfecta de Galdós,” Boletín de Filología 44.1 (2009): 85. 36 See, for instance, Carmen Menéndez Onrubia, Introducción al teatro de Benito Pérez Galdós (Madrid: CSIC, 1983); Jesús Cruz Valenciano, El surgimiento de la cultura burguesa en la España del siglo XIX (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2014); Diane Faye Uray, The Novel Histories of Galdós (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 147–148. 37 Cercas, “Galdós.” 38 Almudena Grandes, qtd. in Andrea Aguilar and Javier Rodríguez Marcos, “Galdós, una vieja polémica nacional,” El País, 17 February 2020. 39 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “En defensa de Galdós,” Babelia, 13 February 2020. 40 Mario Vargas Llosa, “En favor de Pérez Galdós,” El País, 19 April 2020. 41 Vargas Llosa, “En favor de Pérez Galdós.” Several years later, in a peculiar instance of self-correction, Vargas Llosa would shift his position on Galdós, dedicating an entire book to disabusing readers of the idea that Galdós was the meritorious literary giant he has been made out to be. See Mario Vargas Llosa, La mirada quieta (de Pérez Galdós) (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2022), 20. The introduction to the book is essentially an extended and edited version of the El País article. 42 See “Miles de personas rinden tributo a Anguita y Couso en las manifestaciones contra la guerra,” ABC, 10 April 2003; Angel S. Harguindey, “Desidia official contra la Casa de Lorca,” El País, 19 November 1996, 37. 43 See Francisco J. Titos, “Saramago y García Montero piden el voto para IU en un manifiesto,” El País, 9 March 2000, 34; Antonio Maira, “Entrevista a Belén Gopegui: ‘Quizá uno de los pocos espacios válidos que le queden a la literatura sea el lento trabajo de cribar el miedo,’” Rebelion.org, 4 November 2004, https:// rebelion.org/quiza-uno-de-los-pocos-espacios-validos-que-le-queden-a-la -literatura-sea-el-lento-trabajo-de-cribar-el-miedo/. 44 Akiko Tsuchiya, “Gender, Sexuality, and the Literary Market in Spain at the End of the Millennium,” in Women’s Narrative and Film in Twentieth-century



Notes to Pages 167–169

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Spain: A World of Difference(s), eds. Ofelia Ferrán and Kathleen Mary Glenn (New York: Routledge, 2002), 242. For further criticism of Grandes’s early fiction, see Katie J. Vater, Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-Transition, 1992–2014 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2020), 70–77; Manuel García-Viñó, “La impotencia creadora de Almudena Grandes,” Rebelión.org, 19 October 2005, https://rebelion.org/la-impotencia-creadora-de -almudena-grandes/. 45 William M. Sherzer, “El compromiso político en la obra literaria y periodística de Almudena Grandes,” España contemporánea. Revista de literatura y cultura 24–25.2–1 (2015): 124. 46 See, for example, Joaquín Leguina, “Enterrar a los muertos,” El País, 24 April 2010; David Callejo, “Parla da el nombre de Almudena Grandes a uno de sus edeficios más emblemáticos,” Cadena SER, 10 March 2022, https://cadenaser .com/2022/03/10/parla-da-el-nombre-de-almudena-grandes-a-uno-de-sus -edificios-mas-emblematicos/; Daniel Gascón, “El placer, la derecha y la izquierda,” Letras Libres, 31 December 2010. 47 Despite Grandes’s embrace of the criticism, scholars have largely rejected it. See, for example, Lorraine Ryan, Gender and Memory in the Postmillennial Novels of Almudena Grandes (London: Routledge, 2021), x; Lisa DiGiovanni, Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile: Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 150; Milica Lilic, “La novela realista comprometida y la novela testimonial en la España del siglo XXI,” Revista de filología 39 (2019): 265; Sarah Leggott, Memory, War, and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 105; see also, 49. 48 Lorena G. Maldonado, “Almudena Grandes: ‘La Guerra Civil hay que contarla de forma maniquea,’” El Español, 13 September 2017. 49 See Joaquín Leguina, “Enterrar a los muertos,” El País, 24 April 2010; Almudena Grandes, “La condición miserable,” El País Semanal, 9 May 2010; Joaquín Leguina, “Y vuelta la burra al trigo,” El País, 10 June 2010. 50 Sebastiaan Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018), 79. 51 Ryan, Gender and Memory, xvi. 52 Michael Lemahieu, “The Novel of Ideas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan, ed. Dominic Head (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 61. 53 Jeanne-Marie Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 3; emphasis in original. 54 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1.

276

Notes to Pages 169–173

55 Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, 54–56. 56 Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 117–118. 57 See, for example, Alan Singer, “The Novel of Ideas and the Reconciliation with Reason,” Soundings 93.3–4 (2010): 223–233; Hai-Dang Phan and Hao Phan, “Two Readings of Two Books by Viet Thanh Nguyen,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 13.1 (2018): 121–136. 58 See Lemahieu, “The Novel of Ideas,” in Ian McEwan, 60–74. 59 See Javier López, La novela ideológica, 95–120. 60 See, for instance, Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 119–162; Daniel Poch, Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 161–162; Vance R. Holloway, El posmodernismo y otras tendencias de la novela española (1967–1995) (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1999), 127–229. 61 There are notable exceptions to the strictly historical use of novela de tesis. Sara Santamaría Colmenero, for instance, persuasively argues that “in so far as it does not foreground the problem of referentiality, [Javier Cercas’s] Soldados de Salamina might be interpreted not as a ‘hypothesis novel,’” à la Linda Hutcheon, “but rather as a postmodern novel of ideas.” See Sara Santamaría Colmenero, La querella de los novelistas. La lucha por la memoria en la literatura española (1990–2010) (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2020), 288. 62 See Nguyen and Lye, “The Novel of Revolutionary Ideas”; Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser, “Whatever Happened to the Novel of Ideas?” The New York Times Book Review, 20 September 2015, 31. 63 Ignacio Javier López, “Revolución, Restauración y la novela de tesis,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 52.1 (1999): 21. 64 Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 109. 65 Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas, 3; emphasis in original. 66 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 308; cited in Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 115. 67 J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 9. 68 For scholars who cite the quote in their arguments about the novel of ideas, see, for instance, Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 116; Michael Lemahieu, “The Novel of Ideas,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 179. 69 Ian Gibson, “Lorca: Setenta años después,” El País, 18 August 2006; Stanley Payne, qtd. in Antonio Astorga, “El objetivo de la ley de memoria histórica es trazar una línea tajante entre «buenos» y «malos»,” ABC, 17 December 2006.



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70 Ley 52/2007, de 26 de diciembre, por la que se reconocen y amplían derechos y se establecen medidas en favor de quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la guerra civil y la dictadura (BOE no. 310, de 27 de diciembre de 2007), 3–5. 71 See Omar G. Encarnación, Democracy without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 166–167. 72 Almudena Grandes, El corazón helado (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2007), 741. 73 These include novels by Lidia Falcón, Javier Cercas, and Rosa Montero. See Colmenero, La querella de los novelistas, 283–289; José Monleón, Del franquismo a la posmodernidad (Madrid: Akal, 1995), 215. See Chapter 2 on Muñoz Molina and Chapter 6 on Aramburu for my account of how those two writers have contributed to the novel of ideas. 74 In fact, only a couple of scholars have ever approached the subject, reading her novels alongside the French roman à thèse. See Geneviève Champeau, “Les « romans de la mémoire » renouvellent-ils le roman à thèse?” Bulletin Hispanique 118 (2016): 195–214; Angélique Pestaña Jañez, “Famille et valeurs dans trois romans d’Almudena Grandes: Malena es un nombre de tango, Los aires difíciles et El corazón helado” (Ph.D. diss., Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2017), 126, 323. 75 See Peio H. Riaño, “La novela política entre las palabras y las ideas,” Público, 13 March 2011. 76 Almudena Grandes, qtd. in “Almudena Grandes afirma que cada mañana ‘fusilaría’ a dos o tres voces que le ‘sacan de quicio,’” Europa Press, 3 March 2007. 77 Almudena Grandes, qtd. in “Almudena Grandes reconstruye la historia sentimental de dos familias marcadas por la Guerra Civil en ‘El corazón helado’,” Europa Press, 12 February 2007. 78 Carmen de Urioste, “Memoria de la Guerra Civil y modernidad: El caso de El corazón helado de Almudena Grandes,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 87.8 (2010): 949. 79 See Ryan, Gender and Memory, 17–35. 80 Adam Kelly, “Development through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas,” Studies in the Novel 44.3 (2012): 280. 81 Grandes, El corazón helado, 50. 82 Grandes, El corazón helado, 42, 44, 98. 83 Grandes, El corazón helado, 42. 84 See, for example, Grandes, El corazón helado, 244–245, 423. 85 Grandes, El corazón helado, 344, 878. 86 Grandes, El corazón helado, 33. 87 Grandes, El corazón helado, 517. 88 See, for example, Grandes, El corazón helado, 246–247, 277.

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Notes to Pages 180–187

89 Grandes, El corazón helado, 840. 90 Grandes, El corazón helado, 841. 91 Grandes, El corazón helado, 849. 92 Grandes, El corazón helado, 849. 93 Almudena Grandes, “México,” El País, 24 November 2008. 94 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “¿Chistes viejos?” El País, 25 November 2008. 95 Gregorio Marañón y Bertrán de Lis, “Rectificar,” El País, 27 November 2008. 96 Hermann Tertsch, “Milicianos progresistas,” ABC, 25 November 2008. 97 Almudena Grandes, “Respuesta a Muñoz Molina,” El País, 26 November 2008. 98 Joaquina Prades, “El oscuro huerto de Getsemaní,” El País, 21 May 2000. 99 Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Una frase de San Juan de la Cruz,” El País, 27 November 2008. Muñoz Molina is referring to the feminine gender of the last word in the phrase, which in Spanish is perfecta (feminine) as opposed to perfecto (masculine), as well as to the implied subject of the sentence, which is alma. 100 Muñoz Molina, “¿Chistes viejos?” 101 Pío Moa, “Represión y ‘memoria histórica,” La ilustración liberal. Revista española y americana 32 (2007): 20. 102 Editorial, “Otra muestra de ‘tolerancia progresista,’” Libertad Digital, 26 November 2008. 103 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in TwentiethCentury Spain (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), xix. 104 Mary Vincent, “‘The Keys of the Kingdom’: Religious Violence in the Spanish Civil War, July–August 1936,” in The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Chris Ealham and Michael Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 86–87. 105 Alejandro Lerroux, “Rebels, Rebels!” (1906), translated by Jon Cowans, in Jon Cowans, Modern Spain: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 103. 106 Julián Casanova, A Short History of the Spanish Civil War, revised edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 62. 107 See Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 133, 275, 330, 333–334, 460. 108 See Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Encuesta de Población Activa (EPA), https://www.ine.es/prensa/epa_tabla.htm. 109 See Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Encuesta de Población Activa (EPA), Ambos sexos, Total Nacional, Menores de 25 años, https://www.ine.es/jaxiT3 /Datos.htm?t=4247#!tabs-grafico. 110 “Más de 500 familias desalojadas por día en España,” BBC News, 3 October 2012. 111 See Caroline Gray, Territorial Politics and the Party System in Spain: Continuity and Change since the Financial Crisis (London: Routledge, 2020), 30.



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112 Lala Toutounian, “Almudena Grandes: ‘Un libro siempre es un producto ideológico, escribir es contar el mundo,’” Infobae, 30 April 2017. 113 See, for example, Almudena Grandes, “Cultura,” El País, 13 October 2008; Almudena Grandes, “El ‘plan A,’” El País, 17 October 2011. 114 On December 13, 2013, Grandes wrote an op-ed for the New York Times whose title, in Spanish translation, was “Los besos en el pan.” Although this op-ed is perhaps the namesake for the subsequent novel, Grandes’s opinion journalism on the topic predates this one-off piece, and her most explicit narrative thinking on the topic appears in the 2012 column for El País Semanal. See Almudena Grandes Hernández, “Los besos en el pan,” New York Times, 13 December 2013; Almudena Grandes Hernández, “When We Were Poor Before,” New York Times International Edition, 14 December 2014. 115 Sherzer, “El compromiso político en la obra literaria y periodística de Almudena Grandes,” 129–130. 116 J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, “Seducir al lector,” La Vanguardia, 6 November 2015. 117 Ana Rodríguez Fischer, “Una historia de muchas historias,” El País, November 18, 2015. 118 Peio H. Riaño, “Almudena Grandes: “La crisis ha sido una guerra y hemos perdido,” El Español, 5 November 2015. 119 Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, 100. 120 Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 121. 121 Almudena Grandes, Los besos en el pan (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2015), 14. 122 For other instances of allegorical summary in the novel, see, for example, Grandes, Los besos en el pan, 82–83, 95–96, 127, 155–156, 167, 289, 322. 123 Grandes, Los besos en el pan, 68. 124 “Southern European Workers Fuel German Immigration Surge,” BBC News, 8 May 2013; Kate Connolly, “Young Spaniards Flock to Germany to Escape Economic Misery Back Home,” The Guardian, 7 July 2013. 125 Spain’s national wire service, Agencias EFE, first reported the news, which quickly spread across the country. See, for example, “Almudena Grandes dejó escrito el séptimo volumen de sus ‘Episodios de una Guerra interminable,’” Diario de Sevilla, 27 November 2021; “Almudena Grandes dejó escrita la séptima novela de sus Episodios,” El Mundo, 27 November 2021. 126 “‘Todo va a mejorar’, la novela póstuma de Almudena Grandes, verá la luz a finales de año,” Diario de Cádiz, 15 June 2022. 6. Literary Populism 1 These figures are from Teresa Whitfield, Endgame for ETA: Elusive Peace in the Basque Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 29.

280

Notes to Pages 194–198

2 Paul Preston, “The Urban and Rural Guerrilla of the 1940s,” in Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction: The Struggle for Modernity, eds. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 230. See also Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (New York: Norton, 2012), xi. 3 On the “pact of forgetting,” see, for example, Omar G. Encarnación, Democracy without Justice in Spain: The Pact of Forgetting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 27–49. 4 For a thorough discussion of Francoism and the Spanish legal system, see Francisco Espinosa Maestre, Shoot the Messenger?: Spanish Democracy and the Crimes of Francoism: From the Pact of Silence to the Trial of Baltasar Garzón, trans. Richard Barker (East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2013). 5 Fernando Aramburu, “La paz de Euskadi,” El País, 13 September 2011. 6 For an investigative account of the period, see Paddy Woodworth, Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 7 Aramburu, “La paz de Euskadi.” For an overview of the situation of ETA prisoners outside of the Basque Country circa 2011, see Whitfield, Endgame for ETA, 254–256; see also, Marta Fernández Cabrera, “La política de dispersion de presos de ETA a la luz de la jurisprudencia del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos,” Cuadernos de Política Criminal 125 (2018): 107–147. 8 Fernando Aramburu, Patria (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2016); Fernando Aramburu, Homeland, trans. Alfred MacAdams (New York: Pantheon, 2019); hereafter cited parenthetically in the Spanish original followed by the English translation. Throughout this chapter, unless otherwise noted, I quote my own translation of the Spanish original. 9 Here and elsewhere, I use the term Basque conflict to describe, on the one hand, ETA’s armed nationalist insurgency against the Spanish state, as well as the Spanish state’s violent response; and, on the other hand, the broader nonviolent nationalist opposition between Spain and the Basque Country, which goes back centuries but mostly took off with the rise of Basque nationalism in the late nineteenth century. 10 Fernando Aramburu, “¿Por qué matamos?” El País, 24 February 1998. 11 Aramburu, “¿Por qué matamos?” 12 Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 109–110. 13 On the scholarly debate over the interpretation of ETA’s political agenda, see, for example, William A. Douglass and Joseba Zulaika, “On the Interpretation of Terrorist Violence: ETA and the Basque Political Process,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 32.2 (1990): 238–257.



Notes to Pages 198–203

281

14 Justin Crumbaugh, “Are We All (Still) Miguel Ángel Blanco? Victimhood, the Media Afterlife, and the Challenge for Historical Memory,” Hispanic Review 75.4 (2007): 371. 15 Eduardo Maura, Los 90: Euforia y miedo en la modernidad democrática española (Madrid: Akal, 2018), 118. 16 “Foro de Ermua: ‘Amigo Savater, te equivocas gravemente,’” Libertad Digital, 23 May 2005. 17 Aramburu’s book appears to be second only to Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento (2001), which is believed to have sold 15 million copies. However, Zafón’s book is a work of genre, rather than literary, fiction. 18 Nuria Azancot, “La rebelión de los superventas,” El Cultural, 7 December 2018; Fernando Aramburu, “1968, cincuénta años después,” El Mundo, 11 February 2018; Fernando Aramburu, “Diez días en la grieta,” El Mundo, 18 February 2018. 19 Josep Maria Nadal Suau, “Patria,” El Cultural, 30 September 2016. 20 José María Pozuelo Yvancos, “‘Patria,’ la novela de las víctimas,” ABC, 13 September 2016. 21 On the “novela de tesis” in Spain, see Chapter 5. 22 “La patria más amarga de Fernando Aramburu,” La Razón, 31 August 2016. 23 Donostia/San Sebastian 2016 Europako Kultur Hiriburua. Capital Europea de la Cultura, “Ramon Saizarbitoria & Fernando Aramburu (Elkarrizketa osoa conversación completa),” YouTube, November 7, 2016, . 24 Rodri García, “Fernando Aramburu: ‘‘Patria’ no demuestra ninguna tesis, me he limitado a contar historias,” La Voz de Galicia, 17 November 2016. 25 Mario Vargas Llosa, “El país de los callados,” El País, 4 February 2017. 26 Borja Hermoso, “‘Patria’, el incómodo espejo de Euskadi,” El País, 13 February 2017. 27 Edurne Portela, El eco de los disparos: Cultura y memoria de violencia (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2017), v. 28 Iker Seisdedos, “Fernando Aramburu: ‘La derrota literaria de ETA sigue pendiente,’” El País, 2 September 2016. 29 Juan Manuel Díaz de Guereñu, “Intimidad del daño: Las víctimas del terrorismo en Los peces de la amargura de Fernando Aramburu,” Monteagudo 12 (2007): 187. A shorter version of this quote also appears in Juan Manuel Díaz de Guereñu, “De algo triste: Los peces de la amargura de Fernando Aramburu,” Revista de Occidente 312 (2007): 126. 30 In addition to El País and El Mundo, Aramburu has written regularly for the weekend magazine El Cultural since 2000. For many years, he wrote a paragraph-length column under the title “Pan de higo” (Fig bread), and has, as of this writing, written nearly 350 pieces for the magazine.

282

Notes to Pages 203–204

31 See, for instance, Fernando Aramburu, “A la caza de politicos plagiarios,” El País, 8 February 2013; Fernando Aramburu, “Límites de una política de la izquierda en Alemania,” El País, 5 September 2013; Fernando Aramburu, “Alemania, una lección de humildad,” El País, 1 April 2015. 32 See, for example, Fernando Aramburu, “Pitar el himno,” El País, 22 June 2012; Fernando Aramburu, “Crítica de la crítica,” El País, 12 July 2013. 33 See, for example, Fernando Aramburu, “María Frisa, la persistencia y la solidaridad,” El Mundo, 24 June 2017; Fernando Aramburu, “Lecturas omnívoras y lecturas veganas,” El Mundo, 9 July 2017; Fernando Aramburu, “María Teresa Castells y el humo de los libros,” El Mundo, 18 September 2017. All of these columns concern the politicization of literary writing and bear the mark of the political blowback Aramburu received for Patria, primarily from Basque writers. For examples of this blowback, see Hermoso, “‘Patria.’” 34 Fernando Aramburu, “Estamos hechos de palabras,” El Mundo, 30 July 2017. 35 Unidad Editorial, “Fernando Aramburu, todos los domingos en El Mundo,” News release (June 2, 2017), http://www.unidadeditorial.es/noticia.aspx?id= 4290. 36 Seisdedos, “‘La derrota literaria de ETA.’” As with the historical memory movement that seeks to recover Francoist victims, Basque society relied on a similar kind of generational memory during the Francoist period to keep alive its languages and dialects, as well as cultural traditions. Aramburu’s dismissive attitude toward the role of memory in contemporary society is noteworthy. 37 See, for example, Daniel S. Whitaker, “Power of Persuasion in Pardo Bazán’s ‘La tribuna,’” Hispanic Journal 9.2 (1988): 71–80; Julia Chang, “From Castus to Casticismo: Conceptions of Purity in Modern Spain” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013), 61. 38 Graciela Montaldo, Zonas ciegas: Populismo y experimentos culturales en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), 12; Tom McEnaney, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 8. 39 Simon During, Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 118; Emily Steinlight, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 108. 40 Beth Blum, “Ulysses as Self-Help Manual? James Joyce’s Strategic Populism,” MLQ 74.1 (2013): 86; James P. Carson, Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–24. 41 William Leonard Schwartz, “A Literary Portrait of M. André Thérive: Crusader for Good French and for ‘the Novel for the Novel’s Sake,’” The French Review 5.5 (1932): 389.



Notes to Pages 205–207

283

42 José Carlos Mariátegui, “Populismo literario y estabilización capitalista,” Amauta 28 (1930): 6. For a broader account of Mariátegui’s views on populism, see Erin Madarieta, “A Realist Indigenism: The Embattled Political Aesthetics of José Carlos Mariátegui and Amauta” (master’s thesis, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2019). 43 Mariátegui, “Populismo literario,” 7. 44 On French literary populism’s relationship to previous literary movements, see Felix Walter, “Populism,” PMLA 49.1 (1934): 356–364. 45 Mariátegui, “Populismo literario,” 6–8. 46 Luisa Elena Delgado, La nación singular: Fantasías de la normalidad democrática Española (1996–2011) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2014), 100. 47 Antonio Francisco Pedrós-Gascón, “Héroes para un nuevo 98 (Acerca de una invisibilidad ideológica en la novela española reciente),” España Contemporánea: Revista de Literatura y Cultura 22.1 (2009): 14–15. For more on the movement to aesthetically recover the work of fascist writers in Spain, see Sebastiaan Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018), 127–133. 48 María Elvira Roca Barea, Imperiofobia y la leyenda negra: Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el Imperio español (Madrid: Siruela, 2016). Scholars have issued significant critiques of her work—namely, that her sources do not support her overall argument. Similar to Aramburu, Roca Barea, Martínez writes, “has gone from being sales phenomenon to a creator of opinion.” Also similar to Aramburu, Roca Barea, according to Villacañas, uses populist rhetorical strategies to make her argumentative claims. See Juan Eloy Gelabert, “Imperiofobia: luces, sombras y claroscuros,” Revista de Libros, 22 November 2017; Miguel Martínez, “El imperio del extremo centro,” CTXT, 20 December 2017; José Luis Villacañas, Imperiofilia y el populismo nacional-católico (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2019). 49 Elena Méndez, “Aramburu nos lleva a la patria de las víctimas,” La Voz de Galicia, 10 October 2017. 50 Domingo Ródenas de Moya, “Crítica de ‘Patria’: El muerto, muerto queda,” El Periódico, 6 September 2016. 51 Ana María Casas Olcoz, “El fenómeno Patria, de Fernando Aramburu: Una nueva narrativa en torno al terrorismo vasco” (master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 2018), 42. 52 Mari Jose Olaziregi, “Novela vasca, o la memoria de la nación,” Romance Notes 51.1 (2011): 69. 53 The parenthetical citation here only refers to the Spanish original. In English translation, the term maqueto (also written as maketo) has been translated as “those who immigrated to the Basque Country from other parts of Spain,” thus losing its pejorative connotation.

284

Notes to Pages 208–217

54 Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 120–121. 55 Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 19–20. 56 In the earlier novel, Aramburu describes his protagonists as “humble people” in search of “the humble truth of the individual.” See Fernando Aramburu, Años lentos (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2012), xx. For an account of “humble people” in Aramburu’s work, see Joseba Gabilondo, “From Postcolonial Tourism to Postimperial Melodrama: Fernando Aramburu’s Patria as Spanish Terrorism-Pornography,” in Postcolonial Spain: Coloniality, Violence, Independence, ed. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2023), 24. 57 See, for example, J. A. Vega Ortega, “La OIT se fija en las pymes para atajar el acoso laboral en el trabajo,” El País, 11 December 2019. 58 Edurne Martínez, “Las pymes pagan un 20% menos a sus empleados que las grandes empresas,” Las Provincias, 20 May 2019; See also Matt Bruenig, “Small Businesses Are Overrated,” Jacobin, 16 January 2018. 59 Whitfield, Endgame for ETA, 54; Roland Vazquez, Politics, Culture, and Sociability in the Basque Nationalist Party (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010), 59–74. 60 Robert P. Clarke, Negotiating with ETA: Obstacles to Peace in the Basque Country, 1975–1988 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1990), 66. 61 Given the perceived passive acceptance of ETA ideology in much of Basque society, typically, scholars and journalists articulate their claims precisely to critique them. For an example of how this happens, see Gaizka Fernández Soldevilla, “¿Por qué ETA empezó a matar?” eldiario.es, 24 May 2016. 62 Florencio Domínguez Iribarren, Las raíces del miedo: Euskadi, una sociedad atemorizada (Madrid: Aguilar, 2003), 68. 63 Portela, El eco de los disparos, 180. 64 Portela examines a series of literary works about the Basque conflict that “propose an interpretation of reality from the standpoint of complexity and affective richness.” See Portela, El eco de los disparos, 146–180. See also Joseba Gabilondo, “Terrorism as Memory: The Historical Novel and Masculine Masochism in Contemporary Basque Literature,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 2 (1998): 113–146; and David M. Collinge, “The Turning Wheel of Hostility: The E.T.A. in Literature and Film in Spain since the 1970s” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2015). 65 This is a common trope of counterterrorism analysis, which, according to Joseba Zulaika, “demonstrates how easily deceptive it is, given the horror of terrorist violence, to mask entrenched ignorance as moral and political



Notes to Pages 218–227

66 67 68 69

70

71

72 73

285

imperative.” Joseba Zulaika, Terrorism: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 26. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, “Patria,” The Literary Encyclopedia, 17 July 2018. Josep M. Colomer, “The Spanish ‘State of Autonomies’: Non-Institutional Federalism,” West European Politics 21.4 (1998): 43–44. Luis Prados, “‘Los escritores vascos no son libres, están subvencionados,’” El País, 29 November 2011. Karlos Cid Abasolo, “El euskera en la novela Patria de Fernando Aramburu,” Revista de Lenguas y Literaturas Catalana, Gallega y Vasca 24 (2019): 224. For Aramburu’s apology, see Fernando Aramburu, “Carta a los escritores vascos,” El País, 5 December 2011. Aramburu, in conversation with the fellow novelist Ramón Saizarbitoria, explained how painstaking it was for him to learn Spanish. The implication being that this difficulty arose from euskera receiving all of the financial resources in the Basque Country. “I confess that my mother tongue, in its literary use, has been acquired, conquered by way of study,” he said. “From a very young age, I thought that language determined one’s perspective, one’s view of reality.” See “Saizarbitoria & Aramburu.” As one can see from this passage, translingualism is another feature of the novel. As with his other novel about the Basque conflict, Los peces de la amargura, Patria includes a glossary of Basque words that appear throughout the novel. But the glossary is strewn with errors. For a critique of Aramburu’s use of translingualism and corrections of these errors, see Abasolo, “El euskera en la novela Patria,” 219–223. Marta Figlerowicz, Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2–3. See, for example, Fernando Aramburu, “Utilidad de las desgracias,” El Mundo, 16 September 2018; Aramburu, “La paz de Euskadi.” Coda

1 2 3 4

Pedro Almodóvar, dir., La flor de mi secreto, El Deseo, 1995. Elvira Lindo, “Opinionismo,” El País, 24 May 2005. The Editors, “The New Reading Environment,” n+1 32 (Fall 2018): 5. Carlos Prieto, “Quique Peinado: ‘Los columnistas somos el cáncer del periodismo español,’” El Confidencial, 16 January 2017. For responses to the interview, see David Jiménez Torres, “El columnismo debe morir,” El Español, 28 January 2017; Daniel Salgado, “Disparen al columnista,” El Periódico Extremadura, 7 February 2017. See also Cristian Campos, “Un peine de columnista,” El Español, 26 August 2016.

286

Notes to Pages 227–229

5 Alberto Olmos, “¿Cuánta gente leía a Umbral? ¿Alguien lee a Marías? El columnismo está acabado,” El Confidencial, 17 January 2017. See also Íñigo F. Lomana, “En la era de la prosa cipotuda,” El Español, 21 October 2016. 6 Fernando Díaz de Quijano, “Santos Juliá: “El intelectual no ha muerto, sino que se ha democratizado,” El Cultural, March 27, 2014. www.elcultural.com /noticias / letras /Santos-Julia-El-intelectual-no-ha-muerto-sino-que-se-ha -democratizado/6068. 7 See Francisco Umbral, Spleen de Madrid/2 (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1982), 9; Francisco Umbral, “30 / Los articulistas,” El País, 1 December 1985. 8 See, for example, Sara Robles Ávila, “El último Umbral: Análisis de contenido de sus columnas de opinión,” Círculo de lingüística aplicada a la comunicación 35 (2008): 44–61; Bernardo Gómez Calderón, “Soneto del periodismo,” Barcarola: revista de creación literaria 85–86 (2016): 183–184; Antonio Fernández Jiménez and Margarita Garbisu Buesa, “Las colaboraciones periodísticas de Francisco Umbral en Mundo Hispánico durante la década de los sesenta: la forja del escritor,” Historia y comunicación social 27.1 (2022): 221–231. 9 See Eduardo Martínez Rico, “El columnismo de Francisco Umbral y el articulismo literario contemporáneo,” Dicenda. Estudios de lengua y literatura españolas 38 (2020): 54–55; M. Martínez, “Nieto: «Las columnas de Umbral tienen el ritmo de un soneto»,” Diario Sur, 27 July 2012. 10 For brief histories of the “think piece” and “hot take,” see, for example, David Haglund, “Why ‘Think Piece’ is Pejorative,” Slate, 7 May 2014; Elspeth Reeve, “A History of the Hot Take,” The New Republic, 13 April 2015; Tomás Ríos, “A Brief History of Bad Sports Writing,” Pacific Standard, 15 August 2013. 11 On the shift toward opinion in American journalism, see Ronald N. Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley, The Space of Opinion: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kimberly Meltzer, From News to Talk: The Expansion of Opinion and Commentary in US Journalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019). 12 Kathleen Kingsbury, “Why We’re Retiring the Term ‘Op-Ed,’” New York Times, 27 April 2021, A22. See also Michael J. Socolow, “Elegy for Op-Ed,” Reason, 27 April 2021. 13 Almudena Grandes, Todo va a mejorar (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2022). 14 Elena Ferrante, “This Is My Last Column,” The Guardian Weekend, 12 January 2019. See also Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2019).

Acknowledgments This book has not been with me for very long, but it has already accrued many unpayable debts. First and foremost, I am grateful to my advisors at Cornell, who perhaps trained a different specialist but not a different person. Bruno Bosteels, Simone Pinet, and María Antonia Garcés were with me from day one. They taught me how to be a scholar, and have been a constant source of guidance, support, and inspiration ever since. Thank you for everything. I am very lucky to have many wonderful friends, mentors, and scholars who have supported my work over the years. For conversations, advice, and myriad other forms of support, I would like to thank: Eugenia Afinoguénova, Madera Allan, Palmar Álvarez-Blanco, Alessandro Angelini, Consuelo Amat, Emily Anderson, Wilda Anderson, Emily Apter, Jamie Armstrong, Gavin Arnall, Elizabeth Anker, Josh Baker, David Becerra Mayor, Humberto Beck, Ericka Beckman, Marina Bedran, Karen Benezra, Jane Bennett, Nolan Bennett, Kata Beilin, Noel Blanco Mourelle, Garth Bond, Ross Brann, Diane Brown, Angus Burgin, Miguel Caballero Vázquez, Eric Calderwood, Bryan Cameron, Christopher Cannon, Matteo Cantarello, Álvaro Caso Bello, Dominica Chang, Julia Chang, Manuel Colás-Gil, Nancy Condee, Jennifer Culbert, Xavier Dapena, Arne De Boever, Jodi Dean, Dan Denvir, Daniel Desormeaux, Elena Delgado, Andre Dhondt, Keila Dhondt, Laura Di Bianco, Simon Doubleday, Emily Doucet, Laurent Dubreuil, Kevin Duong, Hanna Engelmeier, Pedro Erber, Fırat Erdoğmuş, Katryn Evinson, Kim Faber, Victoria Fanti, Gustavo Fares, Harris Feinsod, Leah Feldman, James Fernández, Armin Flender, Jason Frank, François Furstenberg, Joseba Gabilondo, Isaac García-Guerrero, Pablo García Piñar, David Golumbia, Sophie Gonick, Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones, Francisco Gómez Martos, Eduardo González, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Pauline Goul, Stathis Gourgouris, Ignasi Gozalo Salellas, Leslie Harkema, Victoria Harms, 287

288 Acknowledgments

Till Hartwig, Earle Havens, Meg Havran, Ryan Hill, Max Holleran, Patrick Iber, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Thelma Jiménez-Anglada, Emma Johnson, Ronald Judy, Regina Karl, Rayna Kalas, Dan Kaufman, Patty Keller, Seth Kimmel, Becky Kosick, Lena Krian, Larisa Kurtović, Nicole Labruto, Parker Lawson, Bret Leraul, Jacques Lezra, Leonardo Lisi, Philip Lorenz, Ana Luengo, Casey Lurtz, James Lynch, Chase Madar, Geo Maher, Guillem Martínez, Miguel Martínez, Jordi Marí, Ellen Mayock, Tracy McNulty, Jordana Mendelson, Ricarda Menn, Sara Miglietti, Miriam Minak, Geraldine Monterroso, Cristina Moreiras, Luis Moreno-Caballud, Aamir Mufti, Tim Murray, Lauren Mushro, José María Naharro-Calderón, Elizabeth O’Brien, Katrin Pahl, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Sarah Pearce, Donald Pease, Pablo Pérez Wilson, Vijay Phulwani, Iñaki Prádanos, Juliane Prade-Weiss, Rachel Price, Jillian Quigley, Monika Raič, Lauren Reynolds, Bruce Robbins, Jesús RodríguezVelasco, Gayle Rogers, Jesse Rosenthal, Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro, Erin Rowe, Vicente Rubio-Pueyo, Elena Russo, Neal Saccamano, Harry Sieber, Sam Spinner, Neta Stahl, Kyle Stine, Rosa Tapia, Rochelle Tobias, Aziz Rana, Eugenio Refini, Thea Riofrancos, Camille Robics, Ana Sabau, Chiara Salari, Megan Saltzman, Benita Sampedro, Ignacio SánchezPrado, Loreto Sánchez Serrano, Álvaro Santana Acuña, Emilio Sauri, Derek Schilling, Adam Schoene, Danilo Scholz, Stuart Schrader, Matt Seccombe, Adam Sheingate, Todd Shepard, Joshua Simon, Lisa Siriganian, Cristina Soto van der Plas, Tim Spurgin, Anita Starosta, Sam Steinberg, Lisa Surwillo, Nathan Taylor, Sarah Thomas, Christy Thornton, Steven Torres, Enzo Traverso, Carlos Varón-González, Aurélie Vialette, José Luis Villacañas, Geoff Waite, Matty Wegehaupt, Bernadette Wegenstein, Caroline West, and Eileen Yagoda, and the Press’s two anonymous reviewers. This book would not have existed without significant institutional support. In particular, I would like to thank Julika Griem and the staff and researchers at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, where I spent a six-month fellowship that was an intellectual experience unlike any other. At Johns Hopkins, I would like to thank the staff and leadership of the Dean’s Office of the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences,

Acknowledgments

289

the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, and Department of Modern Languages and Literatures for all their support—financially, logistically, and otherwise. The book would also not have existed without a broad academic community. In addition to the scholars named above, I would also like to thank audiences at the Goethe-Universität, the HumboldtUniversität, the KWI, NYU, Princeton, Northwestern, Pittsburgh, Maryland, Penn, Cambridge, Wisconsin, and Chicago, as well as at the MLA, ACLA, ASAP, LASA, NeMLA, ALCES, and the KFLC. Over the years, while working through the ideas in this book, I have tried the patience of countless students in my classes. Thank you to all of them, past, present, and future. I am indebted to a number of editors who took a chance on me and helped me grow. At Public Books, I wish to thank Sharon Marcus, Kate Zaloom, Nicholas Dames, and Gerry Cadava, as well as Kelley Mc­ Kinney and Ben Platt. At boundary 2, I wish to thank Paul Bové and Jonathan Arac. At both publications I was welcomed with open arms. Their generosity since then has been unparalleled, and for that I am eternally grateful. Good editors are hard to come by, which is why I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have had great ones. My deepest thanks go to Roane Carey, from whom I have learned so much. Thanks also to Laura Bennett, Colin Kinniburgh, Miguel Mora, Medaya Ocher, George Quraishi, Anna Shechtman, Dan Sinykin, Lisa Teasley, Stephen Twilley, and Micah Uetricht, all of whom helped me become a better writer and thinker. Perhaps the editors who took the greatest chance on me are Sharmila Sen and Joseph Pomp at Harvard University Press. These are debts I will truly never be able to repay. Joseph improved this book more than he will ever know, providing edits, comments, and other feedback without which this book would be significantly impoverished. Thank you both. Doug Mao, Gabe Paquette, and Bill Egginton are mentors any junior scholar would be fortunate to have. They have guided me through thick and thin, and I would be nowhere without them. Marisa Pagano has been editing and helping me craft this project since before there was any project to speak of; she is a writer’s editor and a tremendous one

290 Acknowledgments

at that. If I have any abilities as an Iberianist, it is thanks to Sebastiaan Faber. In addition to being a wonderful friend and co-author in most of my journalistic endeavors, he mentored and advised me through this project. Stephanie DeGooyer is my writing group, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Without her, this book would still be a conference paper. More than that, she is the friend I always wanted, and now finally have. Facundo Vega was the first person I met in graduate school. He is the model of a scholar I someday wish to become. But he is also a friend, and my best one. Janis Be was the first to believe in me. She set me down this academic path many years ago . . . and changed my life. Finally, the greatest debt I owe is to my family. Across three continents and as many languages, they have filled my life with joy and made it worth living. To Etti, Moshe, Itamar, Tsippy, and Tsipi, ‫תודה רבה‬. To Aurora, Raúl, Marga, Pepe, Gele, Saúl, Raúl, Diego, Laura, Mayte, Ana, Carlos, and Pedri, infinitas gracias. This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Julia, who never got to see it but whose life inspired me to write it. It is also dedicated to my father, Craig, whose boundless love, knowledge, and encouragement keep me going. Lastly, it is dedicated to Ilil and our children, Noam and Laro. She has given me far more than I could have ever imagined, and I am thankful every day for our life together.

Index Abad, Mercedes, 129 ABC, 28, 50, 65, 68, 159, 183, 201, 242n19 Abellán, Manuel, 256n14, 260n72 abertzale left, 194–195, 212–213, 213, 217, 223. See also Basque Country Alameda, Soledad, 41 Alas, Leopoldo (“Clarín”), 10 Alberti, Rafael, 12, 37–38, 69 Aleixandre, Vicente, 12, 86 Alfaguara, 28, 91, 240n80 Allende, Isabel, 24 Almodóvar, Pedro: Kika, 54; La flor de mi secreto, 225–226 Alonso Valero, Encarna, 83–85 Álvarez-Coto, Sol, 41 Amauta, 204 American New Journalism, 125, 132 Anagrama, 91 Angot, Christine, 24 antipluralism, 207–208, 224 Aramburu, Fernando: Años lentos, 208; on Basque writing, 221–222, 285n70; in El Cultural, 281n30; in El Mundo, 200, 203; in El País, 193–198, 201–202; Fuegos con limón, 197; Hijos de la fábula, 228; Los peces de la amargura, 202, 285n71; as novelist intellectual, 3, 5–6, 195–197, 200–201, 203; Patria, 30, 195–196, 199–224, 228, 236n36, 281n17 Aranguren, José Luis López, 37, 102–107, 110, 113, 117 Argentina, 25, 37, 200, 204 Arias Navarro, Carlos, 38, 147 Armas Marcelo, Juan José, 87 Arriba, 35 Asahi Shimbun, 44–45 Aub, Max: Jusep Torres Campalans, 69 autofiction: Cercas and, 5, 30, 122–126, 132, 138–140, 145, 148, 151, 155–157; definition of, 122–129, 266n24; French, 24; historical, 123, 139–140, 148, 155–156, 171; Marías and, 93; and novelist intellectuals, 6, 18, 30, 228

Ayala, Francisco, 12–13, 174; Recuerdos y olvidos, 12. See also novelist intellectuals Azancot, Leopoldo, 65–66, 251n40 Azúa, Félix de, 156 Balzac, Honoré de, 24, 163 Barthes, Roland, 19; “The Death of the Author,” 125 Basque (language), 203, 219–222, 282n36, 285n70–71 Basque Country: Gipuzkoa, 207, 210–212, 223; nationalism in, 56, 106, 193–194, 197, 208, 212, 216, 219–223, 280n9; opinion journalism on, 193–195, 197–199, 202–203; in Patria, 6, 195–197, 199–203, 206–208, 211–224, 228, 285n71; peace process and ceasefires, 193–194, 199–200; San Sebastián, 5, 63–64, 207, 219; Vitoria, 60; writers from, 201–202, 220–222. See also ETA Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), 221–223 Bassets, Lluís, 154 Batasuna, Herri (HB), 222–223 Baudelaire, Charles, 25, 58, 227 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 10 Benda, Julien, 20–22 Benet, Juan, 39, 66, 96–97 Benjamin, Walter: One-Way Street, 80–81 Beuve-Méry, Hubert, 50 Blanco, Miguel Ángel, 70, 198 Bleiberg, Germán: Diccionario de literatura española, 116–117 Blitzer, Jonathan, 48–49 blog posts. See internet writing Blue Division, 175, 179–180 Bolaño, Roberto, 129 Borges, Jorge Luis, 64 Bourdieu, Pierre: The Field of Cultural Production, 23; Rules of Art, 23 Brandt, Willy, 195, 224 Brodsky, Joseph, 86, 88 Burgos, Carmen de, 9

291

292 Index Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 66, 158 Camba, Julio, 51, 131 Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood, 125 Carmen Formoso, María del: Carmen, Carmela, Carmiña, 255n4 Carrero Blanco, Luis, 60–61, 147, 218 Carrillo, Santiago, 140–141, 144, 146 Casas, Ana, 127–128 Caso Rico, 119–120, 151–155 Castro, Américo: España en su historia, 34–35 Castro, Ángeles de, 52 Catalan (language), 10 Catalonia: Barcelona, 10, 61, 63, 129, 133, 137, 205–206; Falangism in, 137–138; nationalism in, 56, 108, 129, 164, 206; newspapers in, 121, 129, 137; publishing houses in, 4; writers from, 5, 40, 52 Catholic Church, 92, 159, 162–164, 182–183, 219 Cebrián, Juan Luis, 32–35, 37–38, 40–42, 44, 48–49, 52, 242n12; La rusa, 40; The Press and Main Street, 32–33 Cela, Camilo José: in ABC, 68; in El Independiente, 251n40; founding of Alfaguara, 91, 240n80; as Franco collaborator, 88–91, 102–103, 105–106, 110–111, 255n15, 260n72; La catira, 105; La colmena, 89; La cruz de San Andrés, 255n4; La familia de Pascual Duarte, 89; as Nobel laureate, 44, 56, 86–88; Oficio de tinieblas 5, 251n40 Cela, Jorge, 91 Cela, Juan Carlos, 91 censorship: in Francoist Spain, 1–3, 36, 49, 52, 59, 89, 102, 105, 116–117, 242n20, 256n14–15; in post-Franco Spain, 55, 92, 129; during Spanish monarchy, 7–8 Cercas, Javier: Anatomía de un instante, 30, 126, 139–150; “An Essential Secret,” 124; autofiction and, 5, 30, 122–125, 139, 151, 155–157; El impostor, 124, 126, 140; El inquilino, 124; El monarca de las sombras, 124, 126–127, 140; El móvil, 124; in El País, 119–221, 139–140, 148–153; El vientre de la ballena, 126, 270n95; Grandes and, 6, 164–166; La velocidad de la luz, 126; No callar, 228; as novelist intellectual, 3, 124, 185, 200, 203; Relatos reales, 130–132, 265n19, 268n41; Soldados de Salamina, 5, 15, 30,

108, 120, 122–124, 126, 130, 132–140, 142, 144, 154, 156–157, 181, 276n61 Cervantes, Miguel de, 163; Don Quixote, 122–123, 152 Chaves Nogales, Manuel, 11–12 Chesterton, G. K., 23, 25, 46 Chicago Defender, 24 Chicago Tribune, 47 Chigumadzi, Panashe: Sweet Medicine, 20 Cierva, Ricardo de la, 38 Coetzee, J. M.: Elizabeth Costello, 173 collaborators (Francoist), 4, 30, 88–91, 101–107, 110–114, 116, 256n14 Constitution of Cádiz, 7, 164 convivencia, 32, 34–35, 38–39, 242n9 Corriere della Sera, 43 Cortázar, Julio, 66 coup d’état (1981), 35, 60, 92, 126, 140–146, 148–151 COVID-19 pandemic, 167, 192, 228 Cruz, Juan, 48 cuadros de costumbres, 70, 161 Dalí, Salvador, 37, 130 Daoud, Kamel, 24 Defoe, Daniel, 23; Robinson Crusoe, 58 de la Cuadra, Bonifacio: Todos al suelo: La conspiración y el golpe, 148–150 Deleuze, Gilles, 14 Delibes, Miguel, 51–53 democracy, Spain’s transition to: Cercas and, 122, 146–147; El País and, 33, 35, 38, 49, 241n4; Grandes and, 175–177; literary populism and, 205; Marías and, 91, 99; Muñoz Molina and, 61; opinion journalism and, 2–4, 12, 227; upheaval during, 59–60 de Prada, Juan Manuel, 28, 205; Las máscaras del héroe, 205 Despentes, Virginie: Vernon Subutex, 18 Diario 16, 12, 43–44, 86–89, 142–143, 241n4 Diario de Granada, 30, 55, 57–59, 61–62, 64, 249n23 Dickens, Charles, 163; Bleak House, 204 dogmatism, 16, 53, 134, 165, 167–168, 195–196, 199 Donoso, José: El lugar sin límites, 25 d’Ors, Eugeni, 10–11, 51 Doubrovsky, Serge, 266n24; Fils, 125. See also autofiction

Index 293 economic crisis. See financial crisis (2008) economics, of writing, 25–28 Eggers, David, 18 El Alcázar, 149, 257n15 El Duende Satírico del Día, 8 El Mundo, 8, 28, 43–44, 119, 154, 159, 200, 203, 227, 236n35, 241n4 El Norte de Castilla, 51–52 Eloy Martínez, Tomás, 25 El País: Aramburu in, 193–195, 197–198; Cercas in, 19–221, 140, 149, 151–153; Espada in, 129, 154; history of, 11–12, 29, 32–44, 48–54; Juliá in, 73–74; Marías in, 36, 67, 92, 95–96, 98, 101–106, 114, 117; Muñoz Molina in, 54, 66–70, 166, 182–185, 251n42; novelists in, 1, 6, 28, 225–227; Sánchez-Cuenca in, 81; Vargas Llosa in, 25, 132, 202 El País Semanal, 5, 40, 92, 158–159, 160–161, 187, 279n144 El Pobrecito Hablador, 8 El Semanal, 92 Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto, 76 Espada, Arcadi, 119–121, 123, 129–130, 139, 151, 154–155 ETA: in Aramburu’s Patria, 195, 197, 203, 206–207, 213–223, 228; violent activities of, 60, 109, 142, 147, 193–194, 197–201, 280n9 Faber, Sebastiaan, 76, 100, 168 Falangism, 35, 38, 91, 107, 110, 126, 133–138, 144, 179 Fancelli, Augustí, 129–130 fascism. See Franco regime Felipe, León, 37 Fernández Flórez, Darío, 112–113 Ferrante, Elena, 229 fiction. See autofiction; literary populism; novel of ideas; individual authors financial crisis (2008), 20, 76–79, 158, 164, 186–188, 190–191 Flórez, Marisa, 41 Forster, E. M.: Howards End, 204 Foucault, Michel, 19, 21 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel, 2, 36, 105, 144–145 Fraga Law, 2, 242n20 France: autofiction in, 125–126, 169–170, 173; and Basque nationalism, 197; intellectuals in, 14, 79; journalism in,

14, 49–51, 205; literary populism in, 203–205; literature in, 18, 24, 105, 160, 204; Spanish exiles in, 175–176, 179 Franco, Francisco, 1, 36, 90, 102, 110, 175, 193 Franco regime: censorship in, 1–3, 36, 49, 52, 59, 89, 102, 105, 116–117, 242n20, 256n14–15; collaborators with, 4, 30, 88–91, 101–107, 110–114, 116, 256n14; crimes and violence during, 173–174, 182–185, 193–194. See also Blue Division Fuentes, Carlos, 66 Gabilondo, Joseba, 69 Gabriel y Galán, José Antonio, 39 Galbraith, Kenneth, 12–13 Galdós, Benito Pérez, 9, 12–13, 163–168, 177, 274n41; Doña Perfecta, 163, 165; Episodios nacionales, 168; Fortuna y Jacinta, 163; Gloria, 165; La familia de León Roch, 165; Marianela, 165; Misericordia, 204; Tristana, 163 Gallego-Díaz, Soledad, 41, 159 Gallimard, 105 García Lorca, Federico. See Lorca, Federico García García Márquez, Gabriel, 39–40, 66, 163; Cien años de soledad, 25 Germany, 5, 50, 126, 190, 201, 203 Gil, Jesús, 148 Gimferrer, Pere, 63 González, Felipe, 44 González-Ruano, César, 51, 131 Gopegui, Belén, 166 Goya Awards, 132 Goytisolo, Juan, 39, 66 GQ España, 119–120 Gracia, Jordi, 99 Gramsci, Antonio, 21–22, 79 Grandes, Almudena: Castillos de carton, 160; El corazón helado, 15, 167–168, 173–181, 187–188, 191; El lector de Julio Verne, 186; in El País, 158–167, 182–185, 187; Episodios de una guerra interminable, 168, 186, 191–192; Inés y la alegría, 186; Las edades de Lulú, 160; Las tres bodas de Manolita, 186; Los besos en el pan, 186–192, 228; Los pacientes del doctor García, 236n36; Mariano en el Bidasoa, 191–192; Mercado de Barceló, 161; in New York Times, 279n144; as

294 Index Grandes, Almudena (continued) novelist intellectual, 3–6, 51, 173, 200; and novel of ideas, 30, 162, 168, 170–171, 174–175, 180; Te llamaré Viernes, 160; Todo va a mejorar, 192, 228 Great Recession. See financial crisis (2008) Guadalajara Book Fair, 28, 221 Guardia Civil, 143, 213, 216 Guerrero, Gustavo, 105 Gutiérrez Mellado, Manuel, 141, 144–146

Jewish people, 35, 55 John of the Cross, Saint: Sayings of Light and Love, 183 journalism. See opinion journalism Joyce, James, 61, 88, 204; Dubliners, 86; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 22; Ulysses, 58–59 Juaristi, Jon, 198 Juliá, Santos, 73–74, 105, 227, 253n75

Ideal, 65, 249n23, 250n37 ideological novels. See novel of ideas Imbert, Gérard, 39 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, 132 indignados movement, 76, 99 Ingendaay, Paul, 96, 98 Instituto Cervantes, 75, 77, 198 Instituto de España, 95 intellectuals. See novelist intellectuals intellectuals, sociology of, 20–23 internet writing, 226–228 interwar period, 11–12, 26, 37 Italy, 37, 140, 160, 190, 229 Izquierda Unida, 166

La Abeja, 8 labor unions, 209–212, 212 La Razón, 50, 240n79 Larra, Mariano José de, 7–9, 17, 25, 53, 131, 161 Latin America, 13, 24–25, 36, 41, 105, 204 La Vanguardia, 50, 107, 137 Leguina, Joaquín, 167–168 Lejeune, Philippe: Le pacte autobiographique, 126 Le Monde, 1–2, 32, 49–51, 233n4, 246n84 Lemonnier, León: Manifeste du roman populiste, 204 Le quotidien d’Oran, 24 Lerroux, Alejandro, 185 Libertad Digital, 184 Lindo, Elvira, 158, 226 Lippmann, Walter: Liberty and the News, 26–27 literary populism: Aramburu and, 30, 197, 207, 222, 224; definition of, 75, 171, 196–197, 204–205, 207–208, 224; novelist intellectuals and, 18, 30; op-ed novels and, 228 literary thought, 30, 94–101 literature. See autofiction; literary populism; novelist intellectuals; novel of ideas Loach, Ken: Land and Freedom, 108 López, Ignacio Javier, 171 López-Aranguren, Eduardo, 103–104 Lorca, Federico García, 12, 37, 135 Lukács, György, 19, 166

Jackson, Jeanne-Marie: The African Novel of Ideas, 172 Jano: Medicina y Humanidades, 92 Japan, 44–45 Jáuregui, Fernando: Todos al suelo, 150 Jerusalem Prize, 55

Machado, Antonio, 133, 140, 219 Madrid: newspapers in, 10–11, 49, 52, 60, 143, 159, 225; in novels, 81, 178, 187–189; violence in, 60, 184; writers from, 4, 8 Madrid Defense Council, 176

Hall, Stuart, 47 Haro Tecglen, Eduardo. See Tecglen, Eduardo Haro Hemingway, Ernest: For Whom the Bell Tolls, 108 Herralde, Jorge, 91–92 Herzberger, David, 59, 62 Hidalgo, Manuel, 87 historical memory: Cercas and, 132, 136, 155, 181, 268n50; Grandes and, 167–168, 186; Marías and, 107–108; Muñoz Molina on, 72–74, 78, 184; in Spain, 72–75, 78, 107–108, 114, 132, 180 Historical Memory Law, 70, 136, 173–174 Huchu, Tendai, 169 Hughes, Langston, 24–25, 238n60

Index 295 magazines. See individual titles Mallea, Eduardo, 13 Manicheanism: Aramburu and, 196–197, 201–202, 213, 217; Cercas and, 165; Grandes and, 162, 167–168, 178; literary populism and, 30, 208, 222–223; Muñoz Molina and, 75 Mannheim, Karl, 21 Marañón y Bertrán de Lis, Gregorio, 182 Maravillas, Madre, 182–184 Marco, Enric, 122, 126, 140 Marías, Javier: Así empieza lo malo, 91, 99, 116, 270n95; Berta Isla, 236n36; career of, 4; Corazón tan blanco, 270n95; in Diario 16, 86–88; “El artículo más iluso,” 101–103, 106–107; El hombre sentimental, 98–99; in El País, 36, 67, 92, 95–96, 98, 101–106, 114, 117; El siglo, 90, 116; on Franco collaborators, 88–91, 101–107, 110–114, 116; on literary thought, 30, 94–101; Los dominios del lobo, 93; Los enamoramientos, 270n95; and metafiction, 123; on Muñoz Molina, 6; “Nada importa,” 106–107; “Narrating the Mystery,” 96; Negra espalda de tiempo, 93; on paradox, 114–117; on Pulp Fiction, 54–55; Todas las almas, 93, 108, 270n95; Tomás Nevinson, 99–100; Travesía del horizonte, 93; Tu rostro mañana, 15, 30, 93, 99, 107–115, 270n95 Marías, Julián, 30, 37, 90–91, 94–96, 98, 103, 110–114; Diccionario de literatura española, 116–117 Mariátegui, José Carlos: “Populismo literario y estabilización capitalista,” 204–205 Marín, Karmentxu, 41 marketplace of ideas, 61 Marliave, Olivier de, 89 Márquez, Gabriel García. See García Márquez, Gabriel Marx, Karl: The Communist Manifesto, 76 Mena, Manuel, 126–127, 140 Menasse, Robert: Die Hauptstadt, 20 metafiction, 122–123, 266n20. See also autofiction Mexico, 24, 28, 37, 221 Millás, Juan José, 67, 123 Mishra, Pankaj, 171

Moa, Pío, 184 modernity, 76–77 monarchy (Spanish), 7–8, 49, 61, 142, 146–147 Montero, Rosa, 3, 123, 159; Crónica del desamor, 40; La función delta, 41; Te trataré como a una reina, 41 Montes, Eugenio, 137 Morán, Gregorio, 35, 107, 137–139 Muguerza, Javier, 103–105 Mujika, Inazio, 202 Muñoz Molina, Antonio: Beatus Ille, 4, 63, 69, 251n42; Como la sombra que se va, 30, 71–75; in Diario de Granada, 30, 55, 58–62, 64–65; Diario del Nautilus, 61, 249n23, 250n37; El invierno en Lisboa, 30, 55, 63–66, 71; El jinete polaco, 55, 69; in El País, 54, 66–70, 166, 182–185, 251n42; El Robinson urbano, 61, 249n23; “El Robinson urbano” columns, 58–59, 65; La noche de los tiempos, 70–71; as novelist intellectual, 3–4, 29, 51, 56–57, 78–82, 85, 92–93, 203, 228; Plenilunio, 70; “Primer Manual,” 58–59; on Pulp Fiction, 54–55; Sefarad, 55, 70; “Teoría del elogio insultante,” 67–68; Todo lo que era sólido, 75–78 National Critics’ Prize, 63 nationalism: Basque, 56, 106, 193–194, 197, 208, 212, 216, 219–223, 280n9; Catalan, 56, 108, 129, 164, 206; Spanish, 76–77, 86–87, 184–185, 205 National Literature Prize, 4, 12, 63, 69 National Office of Press and Propaganda: Censorship of the Press, 89 Ndibe, Okey, 24 newspapers. See opinion journalism; individual newspapers New York Times: Cela in, 88; circulation of, 43; coverage of Spain, 61; Grandes in, 279n114; opinion journalism in, 1, 32, 35, 44–45, 48–49, 223n2, 226, 228 New York World, 44, 46 Ngai, Sianne, 169–173, 188 Nobel Prize in Literature, 12, 44, 56, 86, 88, 110, 112–113, 240n80, 251n40 nonfiction. See opinion journalism Novais, José Antonio, 49, 246n76

296 Index Novalis, 25 novela de tesis, 16, 165, 168, 170–171, 276n61. See also novel of ideas novelist intellectuals: definition of, 12–23; history of, 24–29. See also Aramburu, Fernando; Cercas, Javier; Grandes, Almudena; Marías, Javier; Muñoz Molina, Antonio novels. See individual authors novel of ideas: Aramburu and, 201–202; Cercas and, 165; definition of, 169–173, 188; Grandes and, 30, 162, 168, 170–171, 174–175, 177, 180–181, 189, 191; Muñoz Molina and, 71; novelist intellectuals and, 13, 18, 30, 228 Oakes, John B., 32–33, 45–46, 48 objectivity: in history, 73–74; in journalism, 26–27, 42, 47, 50, 75, 165–166, 196–197; in novels, 75, 165–166, 171, 199, 205, 207, 215 Olesti, Isabel, 129 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 66 op-ed novels: definition of, 17–20. See also autofiction; literary populism; novel of ideas; individual authors op-eds: nut graf in, 190, 194; to-be-sure graf in, 194, 217. See also opinion journalism opinion journalism: global history of, 33, 44–51; Spanish history of, 7–12, 32–44. See also individual newspapers Ortega Spottorno, José, 52, 240n80, 242n19 Ortega y Gasset, José, 10, 11, 51, 219, 242n19; La España invertebrada, 11; La rebelión de las masas, 11 Orwell, George, 79; Homage to Catalonia, 108 Otero, Julia, 119 Pacheco, Joaquín Francisco, 8 Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 9; La tribuna, 204 Partido Popular (PP), 199 Pascual, Jesús: Yo fui asesinado por los rojos, 138 Patria. See Aramburu, Fernando Paz, Octavio, 39, 66, 88 Peinado, Quique, 227 Penalonga, Matilde. See Villanueva, Darío Peninsular War, 7, 205

Pérez Galdós, Benito. See Galdós, Benito Pérez Pérez Oliva, Milagros, 152 Pérez-Reverte, Arturo: Falcó, 236n36; La sombra del águila, 205 Peri Rossi, Cristina, 41, 66 Ping-kwan, Leung (Yesi), 24 Pla, Josep, 51 Planeta, 28, 255n4 Polanco, Jesús de, 11, 35–36, 240n80 political parties. See individual parties Pontecorvo, Gillo, 217; Ogro, 218 Portela, Edurne, 202, 217 Portugal, 64–65, 71, 74, 190; Lisbon, 63–65, 71, 90 Pozo, Raúl del, 68 Pozuelo Yvancos, José María, 201 Pradera, Javier, 41–43, 49 Prado, Benjamín: Mala gente que camina, 105–106 Pravda, 91, 112 Prisa, 28, 32, 35–36, 182, 240n80, 242n19 prizes (literary). See individual prizes Proust, Marcel, 63; À la recherche du temps perdu, 125 publishing houses. See individual presses Puértolas, Soledad, 105 Pulitzer Prize, 4 Quimera, 120 Quincey, Thomas De, 58, 59, 97 Ramírez, Pedro J., 43–44, 241n4 rape. See sexual violence Ray, James Earl, 71–72, 75 readership: of literature, 15, 206, 236n36– 37; of newspapers, 33, 43, 235n35 Real, Carlos Alonso del, 112–113 Real Academia Española. See Royal Spanish Academy relato real, 130–131, 133, 135, 140, 268n41 Revista de Occidente, 11, 202 Rico, Francisco, 119, 151–155, 270n94–95. See also Caso Rico Rigalt, Carmen, 159 Rivas, Manuel, 67, 158 Roca Barea, María Elvira: Imperiofobia y la leyenda negra, 206, 253n70, 283n48 Rodríguez, Emma, 78–79 Roig, Montserrat, 40

Index 297 roman à thèse, 16, 170, 181, 277n74. See also novel of ideas Romanticism, 7–9, 17, 173, 204 Romero, Emilio, 37, 42, 242n12 Rosa, Isaac: El vano ayer, 105 Royal Spanish Academy, 4, 8–9, 26, 62, 69–70, 87 Ruiz Zafón, Carlos: La sombra del viento, 281n17 Said, Edward, 22–23 Saizarbitoria, Ramón, 201; 100 metro, 217 Salambó Prize for Narrative, 132 Sánchez-Cuenca, Ignacio, 29; La desfachatez intelectual, 81–83, 85, 254n85, 255n90 Sánchez Dragó, Fernando, 28 Sánchez Ferlosio, Rafael, 39 Sánchez Mazas, Rafael, 122, 126, 133–140, 144 Santa-Olalla, Julio Martínez, 112–113 Santillana, 36, 240n80 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12–13 Savater, Fernando, 198 Second Republic, 37, 77, 117, 184 Seix Barral, 4, 63 Sepúlveda, Luis, 158 sexual violence, 54, 182–185 shishōsetsu, 125. See also autofiction Silva, Emilio, 108, 268n50 Sindicato Español Universitario, 106 Sinova, Justino, 89 smoking, 119, 151–153 soccer, 67, 87, 99, 148, 203 Socialist Party (PSOE), 60, 162, 182 social media, 226, 228 social problem novel. See novel of ideas Socolow, Michael, 39, 46 Soldados de Salamina. See Cercas, Javier Spain: Andalusia, 55, 59, 61, 65; Burgos, 106; Extremadura, 5; Galicia, 256n7; Granada, 4, 58, 61–63, 62; Marbella, 148; Orbaitzeta, 213; Segovia, 148. See also Basque Country; Catalonia; Madrid Spanish Civil War: censorship during, 1–2, 116–117; collaborators during, 89, 101, 104, 106, 114; crimes committed during, 182, 184–185, 193–194; in El corazón helado, 167, 174, 176; in El siglo, 90; exile after, 12, 37; and historical memory, 74, 114; journalism about, 37–38, 77; in La

noche de los tiempos, 70; in Soldados de Salamina, 122, 126, 132–133, 136, 146; in Tu rostro manana, 109, 111 Spanish Communist Party (PCE), 41–42, 105, 140, 166 Steenmeijer, Maarten: El pensamiento literario de Javier Marías, 97–98 Stendhal, 24–25 Suárez, Adolfo, 49, 122, 140–142, 144–148 Suleiman, Susan, 16, 169, 178, 188 Sulzberger, Arthur, 45 Swope, Herbert Bayard, 46 Tabucchi, Antonio: Sostiene Pereira, 158 Tarantino, Quentin: Pulp Fiction, 54–55 Tecglen, Eduardo Haro, 67, 102–103, 105–106 Tejero, Antonio, 35, 60, 140–142, 145. See also coup d’état (1981) Tertsch, Hermann, 182 Tierno Galván, Enrique, 105 Torres, Maruja, 3, 41, 159; Ceguera de amor, 41; ¡Oh es él! Viaje fantástico hacia Julio Iglesias, 41 Trollope, Anthony, 25 Trueba, David, 132, 154 Tsuchiya, Akiko, 167 Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons, 22 Tusquets, 206 Twitter, 227–228 Umbral, Francisco, 3, 40, 42–43, 56, 68, 105; “Comer, Joder y Caminar,” 44; Spleen de Madrid 2, 227 Unamuno, Miguel de, 10, 135 United Kingdom, 27, 47, 126 United States: financial crisis in, 187; foreign policy of, 13; journalism in, 26, 47–50, 273n21; labor violations in, 211; literature in, 24, 27, 226; New York City, 75, 77 Urioste, Carmen de, 177 Valente, José Angel, 39 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 1, 25, 132, 163, 166, 202, 274n41 Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, 25 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel, 3, 40, 66 Venezuela, 105, 109

298 Index Vergès, Josep, 52 Vidal Beneyto, José, 39 Vila-Matas, Enrique, 129 Villanueva, Darío, 87, 256n7

39–41, 159–160; sexual violence against, 182–185 World War II. See Blue Division Worthington, Marjorie, 127–128

Washington Post, 47–50 Winter, Ulrich, 84–85 women: in journalism, 41, 158–160; in literature, 160–161; in op-ed pages,

Ysàs, Pere, 105, 260n72 Zabalza, Mikel, 213–215 Zola, Émile, 21, 163