The Aesthetics of the Ephemeral

Memory Theaters in Contemporary Barcelona

Jennifer Duprey

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438452357
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Aesthetics of the Ephemeral, Jennifer Duprey examines five contemporary plays from Barcelona: Olors and Testament by Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, Antígona by Jordi Coca, Forasters by Sergi Belbel, and Temptació by Carles Batlle. She argues that in both the theatrical text and its performance an aesthetics of the ephemeral materializes that is related to specific manifestations of cultural and historical memory in Spain and Catalonia. These manifestations of memory include historical concerns such as the possibility of another form of justice in predicaments of violence after the Civil War, and they also include contemporary issues such as the production of ruins by the processes of gentrification in Barcelona, the complexity of immigration in Spain, and the destruction or preservation of Catalan cultural legacies. In her analysis of these topics, Duprey engages and expands on theories related to questions of subjectivity and identity in late modernity. This book will be of interest to those concerned with Iberian cultural studies and with how theater reflects on and contributes to contemporary political dialogue.

CHAPTER ONE

THE JOURNEY IN THE DESERT

The grandeur of deserts derives from their being, in their aridity, the negative of the earth’s surface. … The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too. A product of the gaze that stares out and finds nothing to reflect it … for there to be silence, time itself has to attain a sort of horizontality; there has to be no echo of time in the future, but simply a sliding of geological strata one upon the other giving out nothing more than a fossil murmur.

—Jean Baudrillard, America (2010)

Deserts, as the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard beautifully describes them, are magnificent. Their grandeur derives from a paradox that is intrinsic to deserts’ magnificence: their austerity. For deserts are arid spaces, wastelands, desolate and unprotected. Deserts are the negative of the earth’s surface, places where silence and time intermingle and become simultaneously visual and fossilized. Once time freezes in deserts, there is no echo of a future. Yet, Hannah Arendt observes that the greatest danger in the desert is that there are sandstorms, for the desert is not always as quiet as a cemetery. In the desert, everything is possible, and thus even autonomous movements might begin.¹ Initiating a journey in the desert, then, is a daunting task. We are forced to ask: How do those who traverse the desert do it? Do all of those who traverse deserts—places marked by loss, emptiness, and even exile—find an oasis in them? Catalan drama, one of the artistic manifestations most deeply rooted in Catalan cultural and intellectual tradition, traversed during the long decades of Francoism a vast deserted land.² The prominent Barcelona playwright Josep Maria Benet i Jornet refers to this crossing of the desert in his essay titled “Del desert a la terra promesa”:

El segon llibre de la Bíblia es diu “Èxode.” Com sabeu en ell s’explica com els jueus van fugir de la captivitat que patien a Egipte i van viatjar durant quaranta anys pel desert, perduts i a la recerca de la Terra Promesa—una terra que sovint dubtaven de poder abastar mai. Però hi van arribar. Encara que arribar-hi, contra allò que havien imaginat, no va a ser el final feliç de la seva història va ser el començament de noves lluites externes i de nous conflictes interns. Bé, voldria establir un paral·lelisme … entre aquella travessia del desert i la història del teatre de text a Barcelona durant 40 anys. (Benet i Jornet 2004, 231)

(The second book of the Bible is called “Exodus.” As you know, in it the story is recounted of how the Jews fled from the captivity that they suffered in Egypt and traveled for forty years across the desert, lost and in search of the Promised Land—a land they often doubted that they would ever reach. But they did arrive there. Although arriving there, unlike what they had imagined, was not the happy ending of their story. It was the beginning of new external battles and internal conflicts. Well, I would like to establish … a parallelism between that desert crossing and the story of text-based theater in Barcelona for forty years.) (Feldman 2009, 11)³

Regardless of its origin, text-based drama was very vulnerable to censorship in postwar Spain. In his rendering of the crossing of the desert, Benet i Jornet declares that the Promised Land was a portent of riches but also of the real possibilities of having to cross the desert again. The journey in the desert thus symbolizes the history of drama and performance in Catalonia. It is a history intimately related with the memory of a society that has been determined by a series of internal and external conditions, especially during the Francisco Franco dictatorship, a period in which any expression of Catalan culture was proscribed.⁴ In fact, the absence of written Catalan drama in Franco’s Spain had its origins in the late 1940s. As Enric Gallén points out, the Catalan scene during these years

did not show sufficient signs of artistic renewal, with the exception of various isolated attempts by Josep M. de Sagarra—in plays such as La fortuna de Sílvia (Silvia’s Fate) (1947) and Galatea (1948)—to mirror the sort of moral drama that was prevalent in Europe in the late1940s. The publication of Salvador Espriu’s important Primera història d’Esther (The Story of Esther) in 1948 was, on the other hand, an exceptional event. (Gallén 1996, 17)⁵

Moreover, at the same time the Teatro Piccolo di Milano was founded in Italy and theater in France was becoming decentralized Catalan theater’s artistic scene was limited and inward looking until the mid-1950s (Gallén 1996, 20). The common impression was that of “a regional and rural culture supplied by commercially-oriented authors, thus reminding Catalans of the exact measure that separates [them] from European culture, and therefore from Europe” (Ibid.). Regarding the status of the playwright in postwar Catalonia, Maria M. Delgado has affirmed: “I’m not sure that post-war Spanish theatre has produced any great writers or plays. You can’t just blame Franco, but neither he is completely blameless. … We shouldn’t judge, but we haven’t produced any great dramatist[s], and no one can really say why” (Delgado 2003, 10). However, Gallén has demonstrated that at the end of the 1940s, manifestations of an authentic, popular, Catalan theater at the Paral·lel (for many, the Montmartre of Barcelona) were destroyed (Gallén 1996, 19). Other examples of the obliteration of Catalan theater were the forced exile of theatrical figures such as Josep M. de Sagarra, Carles Soldevila, and Joan Oliver; isolation from different aesthetics in foreign theater; and censorship of specific translations of foreign plays, something that lasted until the 1950s (Ibid., 20–25). In fact, public performances of plays in Catalan were prohibited in professional theaters in Barcelona until the late 1950s (Ibid., 25). Gallén relates that in effect, already by December 1939, “when faced with a request that the traditional Catalan Christmas Nativity play Els pastorets be performed, the Civil Governor of Barcelona cynically decreed that the performance should not constitute a public spectacle, but an exclusively family-based religious affair” (Ibid.). As Gallén lucidly asserts, “The political message of this injunction was quite clear: Catalan language was to be confined to private and family use” (Ibid., 26). In this political climate, access to cultural and theatrical manifestations in Catalan were clandestine, and for those devoted to the theater, the alternatives were to go into exile or endure and await better times (Ibid.). Yet John London has shown how “the translation of non-Spanish plays into Catalan [led] to the re-establishment of the language as a working theatrical idiom, rather than a folkloric tradition” (1998: 7). To grasp the nature of the repression of difference under Franco, let us now turn to a brief sketch of Francoism’s cultural politics. It is worth noting that from the pulpit to newspapers and radio, the regime’s official propaganda preached essentialist discourses about the Hispanic race and culture, intertwined with the demonization of everything considered foreign. The intended effect of these discourses was nothing less than forcing obedience to the rules of conduct considered convenient by the Spanish government and the Catholic Church (Martín Gaite 2005):

Que sea español nuestro amigo y nuestro criado y nuestra novia, que sean españoles nuestros hijos. Que no haya sobre la bendita tierra de España otras costumbres que las nuestras. Y si esto es un feroz nacionalismo, pues mejor. Y si el que defiende esto es un absurdo retrógrado, pues mucho mejor. (Our friend, our servant, and our girlfriend must be Spanish; our children must be Spanish. Let there be on the blessed land of Spain no other customs than ours. And if this is a fierce nationalism, even better. And if the person defending this is an absurd reactionary, so much the better.) (Castro Villacañas, quoted in Martín Gaite 2005, 29)

The cultural redefinition of Spain was one of the concerns of the new regime. “We do not wish to demand a hasty creative activity, but only to draw attention to the responsibility—the glorious responsibility—of those in whom all hopes are set,” wrote music critic Federico Sopeña in the newspaper Arriba on the last day of 1941 (quoted in Moreda Rodríguez 2008). Hereafter, this would be the official propaganda used to define the appropriate forms of artistic expression in postwar Spain. For the regime, literature, art, and film, as Sebastià Juan Arbó declared, ought to embody “una nueva orientación más acorde con nuestra cultura y nuestra tradición … , con nuestra moral y nuestro concepto de familia” (a new direction more in line with our culture and our tradition … , with our morals and our concept of family) (quoted in Martín Gaite 2005, 32). During the occupation of Barcelona in 1939, as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán highlights in his book Barcelonas, the Francoist authorities ordered that “There was to be no Catalan-lorries, which had arrived with manifestos, and leaflets written in Catalan were intercepted. No political or union organization, no sardanas or popular assemblies. Barcelona has been a sinful irreligious city. What had to be done during the following weeks was to organize a series of Masses and acts of expiation” (Vázquez Montalbán 1992, 142). Furthermore, in postwar Spain, any comment about politics, capital punishment, or the country’s misery was prohibited. The new regime had established as a rule “la obediencia, el cuidado de no murmurar, de no concedernos la licencia de apostillar … la formula [era] esta: el silencio entusiasta” (obedience, care not to mumble or to allow any kind of supplementary statement … the formula [was] this: enthusiastic silence) (quoted in Martín Gaite 2005, 18). In Franco’s view, war had made it possible for Spain to return to its essential being, “españolidad” (Spanishness), which—along with the spiritual values of austerity, obedience, and silence—consisted in the Hispanic race, the Spanish language, and the rejection of different cultures and languages.⁶ Authentic Spain, Giménez Caballero impassionedly cried out, was embodied by Franco: “¿Quién se ha metido en las entrañas de España como Franco … hasta el punto de no saber ya si Franco es España o si España es Franco?” (Who has gotten into the heart of Spain like Franco … to the point of no longer knowing whether Franco is Spain or Spain is Franco?) (quoted in Ibid., 19). Franco proclaimed himself “el Caudillo de la última cruzada y de la hispanidad” (the leader of the last crusade and of the Hispanic world) and “el Caudillo de la guerra de liberación contra el comunismo y sus cómplices” (the leader of the war of liberation from communism and its accomplices). Accordingly, the consistent elements in Franco’s long rule included primarily authoritarianism, nationalism, the defense of Catholicism and the Catholic family, anti-Freemasonry, and anticommunism. All these elements conjoined within this period of Francoist Spain and produced an interplay of universal and particular elements; that is, between the creation of the nation-state and a redemptive “españolidad.” “The doctrine of ‘Hispanismo,’ ” as Henry Kamen has observed, “included, among many other postulates, ‘the existence of a unique Spanish culture, lifestyles, traditions and values, all of them embodied in its language; the idea that Spanish American culture is nothing, but Spanish culture transplanted to the New World; and the notion that Hispanic culture has a hierarchy in which Spain occupies a hegemonic position’ ” (Kamen 2007, 393, quoting del Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman).⁷ By privileging the Spanish language—whose objective, based on the linguistic ideology of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española (1713–1714) was “Limpia[r] fija[r] y da[r] esplendor” (To clean, set, and give splendor to) the Spanish language—Franco’s regime significantly slowed down the development of professional Catalan theater.

In fact, according to Eric Hobsbawm, the nineteenth century witnessed what he denominates “the principle of nationality” (Hobsbawm 1997, 103), which was closely related to the first phase of capitalism. This correlation between capitalism and national development, as José del Valle and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman have indicated, “has a clear corollary: only those territories in which economic growth was possible could be considered nations” (del Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman 2002, 2). This is, del Valle and Stheeman remind us, what Hobsbawm refers to “as a threshold principle” (Ibid.). After 1880, however, a new form of nationalism, “which ignored the threshold principle, began to emerge.” This new nationalism “based its discourse in linguistic and ethnic criteria” (Ibid., 3). Spain thus had “to define itself not only as an effective unit of political action, but also as a social and cultural unit” (Haugen, quoted in Ibid., 7). In fact, the aforementioned forms of unification that nation building entails “require homogenization, that is, the minimization of internal differences, individual and local idiosyncrasies must be subordinated—even sacrificed—for the sake of the nations’ identity”(Hobsbawm, quoted in Ibid.). “From a national perspective … diversity had to be overcome not only materially but also ideologically” (Ibid., 5). In this way, the state’s ideological practices intervened in order to configure “a homogenous space that guaranteed the linguistic, cultural and national unity of Spain” (Ibid.). “The identification of the state,” as Hobsbawm has observed, “with one nation … implies a homogenization and standardization of its inhabitants, essentially, by means of a written ‘national language’ ” (Hobsbawm, quoted in Ibid.). The cultural project implicit in “hispanismo” (Hispanicism) consisted in “the persistence of cultural empire” (Ibid., 7) by means of the preeminence of a univocal Spanish identity and culture. This project was one among many aspects (recalling the continuities between Enlightenment and late-modernity in Spain discussed in the introduction) that would make Spain a modern nation.

When Franco became head of state by embracing the idea and project of nationalist Spain, he considered himself the great Catholic crusader. Victory, Paul Preston has observed, “gave substance to his carefully constructed self-image as the medieval warrior-crusader, defender of the faith and restorer of Spanish national greatness, with his relationship to the Church as an important plank in the theatrical panoply” (Preston 1996, 323). During the nearly forty years that Spain was ruled by an authoritarian government, “cultural manifestations were closely monitored and controlled by the military authority and the Roman Catholic Church. Control of text production, both native and translated, was exerted by juntas de censura (boards of censorship), committees composed of Church representatives, lower-rank officials and men of letters” (Merino and Rabadán 2002, 125). Even when different types of state censorship can be traced back in Spain to the time of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, “under Franco it acquired a new contour, with the religious tints typical of any authoritarian regime that also purports to be defending the true and only religion” (Ibid., 127). Moreover, “members of the pro-Franco political party, the Falange, and the most fundamentalist members of the clergy became willing censors who protected Spaniards from ‘contamination’ by ‘dangerous’ products, whether Spanish or foreign in origin” (Ibid.).⁸ For instance, the Spanish translation of The Complaisant Lover, written by the English author Graham Greene, was subjected to censorship by José María Pemán, a proregime Catholic writer, before it finally was allowed to reach the stage in 1968. The plot of the play, a ménage à trois, was not accepted by the censors because the official belief was that adultery did not and, moreover, could not exist in Spain. Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun was another play whose plot the Spanish censors objected to because Shaffer’s exploration of the Black Legend (the conquest of the Americas) was completely the opposite of the official attitude in regard to the days of the Spanish conquest of Peru and thus called it into question. Homosexuality was even more consistently eliminated than adultery (Ibid., 134–36). For instance, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story “was immediately banned when first submitted to censorship in 1963. After making all of the changes required by the censors, only one performance was permitted in Teatros de Cámara y Ensayo, which were small experimental theatres registered as non-profit organizations” (Ibid., 136). Moreover, it was not until “after the adapter had made the modifications and had toned down the indecent language as requested by censors, that another Albee play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, reached Spanish commercial stages thanks to its huge success abroad and to what the censors denominated as a less morally damaging plot” (Ibid.). At the onset of Dale Wasserman’s musical The Man from La Mancha, which was a successful production on Broadway that won five Tony Awards, “a preliminary document was sent to the authorities arguing in favor of the potential of such a production which, they said, could be positive propaganda for Spain, if the musical were staged in Madrid just after its New York premiere” (Ibid.). Despite few objections to the treatment of the character of Don Quixote, the production became a box-office success in Madrid. However, the same reasoning did not help much when Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar was submitted to censorship. The religious content of the musical was too obvious for the censors. Thus the play waited three years before reaching the Spanish stage (Ibid.). Censorship of theatrical pieces considered foreign by the regime had an impact both on cultural expressions in the non-Hispanic regions of Spain and on important artistic works produced abroad.

As the foregoing discussion has made clear, dual censorship was a central characteristic of Franco’s authoritarian regime. One can argue, however, that authoritarian states did not completely reach their ultimate goal, for individuals and groups have always performed acts of dissidence and disobedience from within.⁹ In that regard, Spain was not an exception.¹⁰ In Barcelona, for instance, the 1950s produced new authors such as Manuel de Pedrolo (1918–1990), representative of the theater of the absurd, and Joan Brossa (1919–1998), who constantly renovated theater by means of his staged poetry and his interdisciplinary tendencies in Catalan performance. Actually, as Jordi Coca indicates, Brossa “was the key to the ‘Dau al Set’ movement, where he coincided for a time with Antoni Tàpies, Joan Ponc, Modest Cuixart and the philosopher Arnau Puig. A prolific creator, Brossa was soon recognised as much for his literary as for his visual poetry, as well as for his installations and performances from 1970 onwards” (Coca 2007, 446). Additionally, the official theater produced during the dictatorship, in the Teatre Romea (1963), changed when new voices brought about the so-called “teat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Aesthetics of the Ephemeral
• Chapter One: The Journey in the Desert
• Chapter Two: Ruins, Loss, Rebirth
• Chapter Three: Tragedy, Violence, Justice
• Chapter Four: Immigration, Displacements, Actualities
• Chapter Five: Inheritance, Memory, Natality
• In Place of a Conclusion: A (Dys)functional Body Politic
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover