Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín and the Novel of Revolution

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Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín and the Novelof RevolutionJosé María Rodríguez García aa Spanish and Latin American Studies , Duke UniversityPublished online: 05 Feb 2013.

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Literature Interpretation Theory, 24:22–47, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1043-6928 print/1545-5866 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10436928.2013.754235

Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín and the Novel of Revolution

JOSÉ MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ GARCÍA

XOSÉ LUIS MÉNDEZ FERRÍN IN CONTEXT: FROM POLITICS TO LITERATURE AND BACK

Born in the provincial capital of Ourense in 1938, “X.L. Méndez Ferrín” (this is how he signs his works) is one of Galicia’s greatest living prose writers and the author of a series of political novels that gradually eschewed the conven-tions of realism. The first of these novels was Retorno a Tagen Ata, written in prison in 1970 and published the following year. Retorno is anachronisti-cally set in the 1960s, during the slow decline of literary socio-realism and the overlapping vogue of the fantastic mode, which among Galician-born authors was informed by the transculturation of philo-Celtic myths and the rewriting of chivalric stories of Breton inspiration. Ferrín’s novella imple-ments a timidly experimental aesthetic by comparison with the late- modernist Spanish-language works of the same decade. Certain techniques of the female Bildungsroman and the medieval quest romance are incorporated into the book’s main plot, which deals with the preparatory stages leading up to an armed insurgency in Tagen Ata––a fictive counterpart to Galicia, one of Spain’s “historic” sub-state nations with an autochthonous romance language different from Castilian.

Tagen Ata’s various radicalized groups (landless peasants, nationalist intellectuals, factory workers) are summoned to join their heterogeneous forces to break away from an authoritarian state, Terra Ancha. The latter implicitly stands for Franco’s Castilian-centric Spain although it may also rep-resent any strongly bureaucratized state which does not recognize a plurality of discrete nations within itself. Writing in 1970, Ferrín strategically treats Terra Ancha as if it were a democracy, although Spain did not have a free general election until June 1977, two months after the Communist Party was legalized. This deliberate discrepancy underlines the idea that the advent of a liberal-democratic state will not solve Spain’s long-standing problem of

José María Rodríguez García is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Duke University.

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Ferrín and the Novel of Revolution 23

how and to what extent the autochthonous rights and self-differentiating institutions of its three “historic nations” (Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque Provinces) should be restored.

An academically trained philologist and medievalist with a primary spe-cialty in French and Galician literature, Ferrín soon became aware that his national allegories—specifically the Tagen Ata narrative cycle published between 1971 and 1987, to which the equally symbolic Arrabaldo do Norte (1964) must be added as a transitional work—were doomed to be decon-structed in skeptical readings informed by poststructuralist and postmodern critique (López Sández 78–79). Nonetheless, this awareness did not discour-age him from attempting an ambiguously open-ended grand récit or master narrative—a Bakhtinian dialogic fiction, to be precise—as redemptionist Marxist ideologies came into crisis. In fact, it propelled him to devise simul-taneously distancing and mimetic narrative strategies. Thus, although Retorno a Tagen Ata features a single narrator—the young female protagonist—it plays out the identity crises implicit in the political conversions and de- conversions experienced by large segments of Spain’s and Galicia’s popula-tions in the early seventies as the collective awareness of democracy’s immi-nent advent became stronger and political orthodoxies were accordingly relaxed. The novella also includes digressions and footnotes dealing with the presumed ancient traditions and institutions of its three principal fictive enclaves (Anatí, Tagen Ata, and Terra Ancha), and ultimately exposes the protagonist-narrator and her main antagonist as unreliable interpreters of their small nation’s present.

The later novel, Bretaña, Esmeraldina (1987), problematizes further the epistemological claims of political narratives by exponentially complicating its plot: it uses a first-person narrator in conversation with multiple alter egos and interlocutors (the main one being Esmeraldina, the addressee repeatedly apostrophized in the text) as well as countless localities and resonant time-frames. The use of these devices highlights the protagonist-narrator’s trau-matic memory disorder, which itself has become a chronic condition. Ferrín’s large repertoire of ironic narrative structures and literary games turns la matière de Tagen Ata (as I will be calling his philo-Breton cycle of political novels that foreground Arthurian motifs) into a mythic creation comparable in complexity and ambiguity to Juan Benet’s better-known Región cycle. It too challenges the reader to assume multiple subject-positions of critique and self-critique without resolving those contradictions into what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a monologic discourse.

Retorno launches a new novel of political revolution whose main fea-ture is that it focuses on hypothetical events which may or may not happen in Spain’s future while showing little regard for both chronological linearity and realistic decorum. It thus questions the sanitized plot of the conventional master narrative of revolution. To be sure, Ferrín’s Retorno gestures in the direction of the historiographic metafiction that revolutioned the novel in

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24 J. M. Rodríguez García

Europe in the 1970s (the hemispheric Americas experienced this frenzy slightly earlier). However, it shuns the related postmodernist gesture of debunking the story’s totalizing claims by means of pastiche, parody, and systematic fragmentariness, as seen in other contemporary Spanish-language novels of which Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s Fragmentos de Apocalipsis (1977) is a classic example. In Torrente’s postmodernist narrative project, the fictionalizing of events from Galicia’s remote past and the use of extended anachronisms blur the boundaries between the truncated promise of a politi-cally engaged fiction (one of the main characters in Fragmentos is a naïve anarchist militant) and its sliding into escapist metafiction. Like Torrente, Ferrín treats history and fiction as competing cultural sign systems. Nevertheless, in his case (unlike Torrente’s) neither system is stripped of its legitimate claims to meaning-making. Although each realm of textual mean-ing is relativized, neither one is disabled through the superimposition on it of a metafictional construct whose outcome would entail the triumph of an authorial consciousness that ultimately diauthorizes the productive rapport between text-bound world and historical world.

Also in Bakhtinian fashion, Ferrín’s political novels borrow chronotopes and conventions from earlier traditions and appropriate subcultures and idiolects from the fringes of society. In his matière de Tagen Ata the event of the revolution is brought about by the combined impetus of enfranchised constituencies and marginalized groups, whose otherwise contradictory class interests are temporarily reconciled through their collective dialectizing of the same oppresive power. My overall argument can therefore be stated in the form of a chiasmus: Ferrín’s “novel of revolution” implies a “revolution in the novel” and vice versa.

Nearly all of Ferrín’s fiction posits as a fundamental horizon of interpre-tation the history, the present conditions, and the possible futures of the Iberian Peninsula’s northwestern sub-state nation—Galicia—and is written in the indigenous language. Although the Galician vernacular boasts a rich his-tory whose first literary landmark is the cantigas de amigo—a large corpus of thirteenth-century female-voiced love lyrics—it only began to approxi-mate co-official status in Galicia in 1981. The Constitution of 1978 still declares Castilian as the only language that “all Spaniards have the duty to know” [todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocer] (Art. 3.1). For many centuries, Galician coexisted with Castilian in a situation of diglossia, often being banned from public life. Ferrín has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1999 and 2008, and was elected President of the Real Academia Galega (a bastion of moderate nationalist sentiment) in January 2010.

This is not to say that he is a unanimously acclaimed writer in his native Galicia, let alone in Spain. Numerous critics and reviewers have carefully singled out for praise the author’s virtuoso novellas and stories which are cast in the fantastic mode yet seem devoid of a political plot. Within the same

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breath, these very critics have generally dismissed his politically engaged output as a failed attempt at writing the great Galician novel. The present essay takes the opposite view: as a novelist, Ferrín is at his best when he is most anti-systemic because paradoxical time-frames are congenial to such performative speech acts as prophecies and utopias and to the mode of his-toriographic metafiction. In fact, he has long envisioned his novels as the implementation of a narrative state of exception to the rules of literary mime-sis and political conformity.

Ferrín was too young to have been able to oppose in 1950 the dissolu-tion of the Partido Galeguista by Ramón Piñeiro (1915–1990), a subdued nacionalista who experienced imprisonment in the 1940s; evolved into an autonomist regionalist who shunned all forms of radicalism in the ensuing decade; and succeeded in creating opportunities for fellow philologists to craft a high-brow literary register of the Galician vernacular under General Franco’s otherwise Castilian-monolingual regime. Ferrín was old enough, however, to be expelled from the general assembly of various allied groups of nationalist youth—the Consello da Mocedade—a few months after its cre-ation in 1963 at the instigation of Piñeiro and his infiltrated informers, who did not want a revolutionary-Marxist party to prosper in Galicia.1 The young radical soon fell under the influence of the global movement in favor of national emancipation that swept Europe and the world in the late 1950s and which resulted in the revolutions of Cuba, Vietnam, and Algeria, among other locations. He thus became converted to a brand of radical galeguismo or Galician nationalist sentiment that sought to merge with Leninist Marxism in what one may call a willed common destiny, namely, the joint effort dis-played by otherwise very disparate groups to emancipate themselves from a central state power that they all have construed as illegitimate.2 These diverse constituencies may forge a coalition of differential interests organized strate-gically on the basis of their equivalential interchangeability. The rhetoric of equivalences allows for the previously irreducible idiosyncrasies shown by two or more self-differentiated groups to be ironed out temporarily so that these groups may join forces in fighting a common oppressor.

The process I have just described informs Ferrín’s political novels. The theory of revolution put forth by Claude Lefort in “La question de la Révolution” (1976) (collected in L’Invention démocratique [1981]) addresses the same problematic, albeit from a different angle. For Lefort, successful political uprisings are the outcome of strands of thought that somehow become intertwined in a common, stronger thread of discontent followed by a series of concerted efforts at overthrowing the oppressive regime in power. It is “the spectacle of diversity” [le spectacle de la diversité] that keeps “a plural revolution” [une révolution plurielle] spreading in the early stages of mobilization (Lefort 188–89). Scholars of the novel may rightly be intrigued by the similarity between this narrative of revolution and Bakhtin’s revolu-tionary concept of narrative dialogism. Just as heteroglot fictions feed off of

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a hybrid array of subcultures, idiolects, and various overlapping historical formations whose emerging vectors of domination have not yet been insti-tutionalized, so may prophetic utterances and revolutionary actions channel the impulses of polyvocal dissent into a cohesive course of action striving consolidate itself. In both cases, this plot’s aim would be to replace the per-ceived living conditions of the present with a new representation of the world.

When understood as a mass uprising that brings together diverse dem-onstrations of discontent into a common front, the revolution qua event can be treated as a form of political action that can easily appropriate heteroge-neous platforms and varieties of either active militancy or passive resistance to an established power. The reason for this flexible status is that revolution-ary processes have the ability to renew themselves quickly as one emerging faction debunks a declining one, as happened with the Bolsheviks’ rapid overshadowing of the Mensheviks in Russia in 1917. Alternatively, seemingly cooperating factions may emerge as a Trojan horse or fifth column, as hap-pened at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with the indiscipline encour-aged by the rebellious, anti-systemic anarchists and by Francisco Largo Caballero’s socialists within the large left-wing coalition that came to power democratically in 1936.3

Similarly, the dialogic novel, as conceived by Bakhtin, is perhaps the only narrative genre capable of embodying a complete system of multi-class social relations, intertextualizing and cannibalizing extant literary modes while still maintaining its status as a polyvocal narrative artifact and “one single heteroglot unit of societal becoming” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic 411–16). The equation of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia with the pragmatic coming together of differing political viewpoints in a specific conflictual context needs some explaining. Ferrín’s treatment of “politics” at times upholds our narrow under-standing of this term as a negotiation of irreconcilable interests that assert themselves in a legitimate environment where dispute takes priority over decisionistic discipline (the definition privileged from Juan Donoso Cortés and Carl Schmitt to Jacques Rancière and Claude Lefort). At other times, however, it engages the suspension of those narrow perspectives in a meta-political dimension that favors the appearance of chance, just as Rancière identifies the distinctive Greek form of democratic representation in Plato’s “lottery draw” [le tirage au sort] wherein all qualifying citizens are given an equal chance at being elected because they are equal (La haine 47).

In the pursuit of a dialogic literary project, Ferrín criticizes the form of the national allegory, which collapses the Bildungsroman with a sanitized nation-making narrative. He also challenges the attempts by classic ethnon-ationalism at placing the apparatuses created by the central state’s bourgeoi-sie in the hands of an autochthonous elite that continues to look down upon the working classes and some of their vernacular cultural expressions. Most other literary genres would be formally and conceptually dilapidated if they

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attempted to embrace the heterogeneous diversity of forms and materials that go into the composition of a heteroglot novel. As Bakhtin has argued, the rationalistic western poetics on which the system of genres rests has his-torically made playwrights, poets, and fiction writers internalize the superior-ity of unified and monologic points of view over decentered and dialogic ones. Thus conceived, poetics and genre theory cannot do justice to the multiple specificity of simultaneously preexisting compositional “wholes” whose joint articulation may not take the form of a linear sequence unless substantial symbolic violence is done to each whole. By contrast, Bakhtin lays emphasis on “a unified truth that requires a plurality of conscious-nesses … one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses” (Problems 81). The dialogic novel becomes what Dostoevsky himself called “the form of a still latent, unuttered future Word” (qtd. in Bakhtin, Problems 90). These aspirations find an echo in the “evental dimension” identified in metapolitical philosophy as the threshold of becoming by which revolutionary “irruptions” are regulated not by the display of particular positions of agency, but by the random combination of multiple and mutually conflicting interests whose shared commitment to change allows for multiple outcomes “beyond all … predictions and calculations.”4

For Bakhtin, the novel may represent all of the social and ideological voices of its era as the “shared existence” of a “plurality of consciousnesses” whose respective totalities have “equal rights” and therefore “are not merged in the unity of the event” (Problems 6). They are not subjected to the reduc-tive process by which one narrative “whole” is translated into the dominant terms of another. As happens in Badiou and Rancière, in the dialogic narra-tive construct the event of subject co-constitution is forever deferred because heteroglot fictions ideally resist the intervention of a monoglot authorial consciousness.5 Furthermore, although the voices of dissent that in Ferrín help articulate a genuine polyphony do matter, they are treated with as much irony as the voices of their ideological enemies, which themselves are not generally or cavalierly excluded.

Ferrín’s dazzling realization of this idea is his narrative tour de force, Bretaña, Esmeraldina, an extreme example of plurinational dialogic litera-ture inasmuch as the present of the story remains in fluctuating communica-tion with multiple works about Brittany or by authors with a Breton name (from the fourteenth-century Roman de Ponthus et de Sidoine to Jack Kerouac and Alain Robbe-Grillet). Bretaña also deals in detail with the multiple chro-notopes inhabited by the protagonist-narrator’s eleven different alter egos and namesakes. These alter egos put the novel’s jailed protagonist—the Breton-Galician terrorist and philologist Amaury-Paul-Marie-Gilart de Keranflec’h, a.k.a. Amaury K.—in contact with the rise of nineteenth-century counter-revolutionary regionalisms in the sub-state nations of Europe’s Atlantic façade; with the Nazi collaborationist successors of these regionalists

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(the Milice Française and the Milice Bretonne) in the 1940s; and with medi-eval Breton and Welsh legends. Ferrín has used this philo-Celticist cultural continuum to mask his political internationalism: as a communist, he renounces neither the recognition of the Galician nation’s right to self-deter-mination nor the emancipation of the working class living around the world under a regime of either internal or imperial colonialism.

We could say with Bakhtin (and with modernist thinkers as disparate as Bergson, Borges, and T.S. Eliot) that in Ferrín’s narratives the past is directed by the present as much as the present is affected by the past. Engaging the merits of Bretaña, Esmeraldina meaningfully requires a book-length study such as Anxo Angueira’s A espiral no espello (2009), which is twice the length of Ferrín’ novel. Retorno a Tagen Ata is admittedly a simpler and leaner work, for which reason alone it remains the primary focus of the present essay. The author’s shifts in emphasis from Retorno to Bretaña elo-quently illustrate the transition from the novel of revolution paradigm of the early 1970s to the daring formal experimentations of the ensuing decade. Numerous events happened in the sixteen years intervening between the publication of the two novels: the poetics of desencanto or mournful com-memoration of the depleted synergies of hope as the peaceful transition from late Francoism to parliamentary democracy exposed revolutionary plat-forms as unrealizable utopias; support for Leninist Marxism dramatically declined among the western European intelligentsia; postmodern skepticism severely undermined the epistemic authority of master narratives while at the same time underscoring the ontology of form generally; and present-oriented metafictions avoided critiquing the energized free market, as if the subversion of narrative codes would correlate with the deregulation policies implemented in state administration.

To varying degrees, some of these developments were represented, albeit in an attenuated form, in such self-reflexive fictions of desencanto as Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s Fragmentos de Apocalipsis (1977), Víctor Fernández Freixanes’s O triángulo inscrito na circunferencia (1982), and Alfredo Conde’s Xa vai o griffón no vento (1984). Ferrín writes Bretaña against the political apathy derived from the interplay of disenchantment and democratic stability as well as the reading elites’ growing access to material commodities. In addition to the three works just mentioned, between Retorno and Bretaña two important novels of de-conversion from revolutionary poli-tics were published: Carlos Casares’s Xoguetes pra un tempo prohibido (1973) and Xosé Manuel Martínez Oca’s A fuxida (1980), which references Ferrín’s real-life attempts at gathering support for his radical party—the UPG—among Galician immigrants in Switzerland (143–44).

Late Francoism witnessed the flowering of both a novel of Catholic counter-revolution and a novel of de-conversion from revolutionary Leninist-Marxist positions. The latter mode was often practiced by intellectuals who embraced bourgeois ethnonationalism. This development encouraged Ferrín

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to cast himself reactively in the role of novelist of revolution whose anti-systemic position could not be easily dismissed, not least because it stubbornly placed itself off center. In trying to neutralize the hegemony of counter-revolutionary fiction (from Torrente to Eduardo Mendoza and Freixanes), Ferrín appropriates every destabilizing technique found in postmodern fiction in order to release the ideological differences contained in local histories. He proceeds to put these local histories to work again in the making of an alternative master narrative of emancipation whose defining feature is that it asserts its own constructed and contingent condition without letting the reader escape into a self-referential play-world wherein political conflicts and challenges cannot—or should not—be seriously entertained. In so doing, Ferrín opposes the historical inevitability of teleological designs while at the same time conceding (contra Torrente) that textual artifacts may legitimately be allowed to intervene in historical processes and vice versa. His is an exemplary case of trying to link the historicity of texts to the textuality of history.

In sum: the rise of a non-revolutionary Left in the late 1970s coincided with the commercial and critical success of such masters of metafiction as Torrente Ballester in Spain or Umberto Eco in Italy. Likewise, the study of the novel was transformed by such studies in ideological skepticism as Tzvetan Todorov’s influential Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970), praised by Carmen Martín Gaite in several of her works, and Roland Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte (1973), saluted by Torrente as the culmination of literary criti-cism’s break with vulgar realism and empirical sociology, that is, with history as the primary horizon of interpretation. Álvaro Cunqueiro, a strict coeval of Torrente, had earlier pioneered—in Merlín e familia (1955)—an autochtho-nous brand of the fantastic mode in which the frontier between mythic events and everyday life is blurred. He also wrote the first novel of counter-revolution in the indigenous language, As crónicas do sochantre (1956). Both works use multiple narrators and foreground the active role of the audience to the detriment of predictable plots. As crónicas is best described as a Galician response to Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949): the focus of the action shifts from the trans-Atlantic periphery of the French empire (Haiti) to its domestic periphery (Brittany). Ferrín’s early influences involve many Catholic conservative writers born in Galicia (Otero Pedrayo, Cunqueiro, and Torrente), which explains why he has devoted such energy to transvaluating existing narrative genres, decentering the ideological assumptions connected to each form and convention of writing. Unsurprisingly, his favorite writings in the theory of fiction are not by Todorov or Barthes. They are, rather, by Fredric Jameson: The Political Unconscious (1981), which explores how literary texts simultaneously conceal and reveal their ideology, and “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), which theorizes the concept of “national allegory” (Méndez Ferrín, “Prólogo” 12, 14).

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REVISIONS AND REVOLUTIONS: LAYING BARE THE POLITICS OF CLASSIC NATIONALISM

Retorno a Tagen Ata is the book where Ferrín’s fictive counterpart to Galicia first assumed the name used in the title and where the fictionalized Galicians were called “azerratas.” They are the natives or residents of the soon-to-be-declared autonomous territory of Tagen Ata, which is part of a morisco plurinational state called Terra Ancha. This colonial state came into existence as a Muslim empire in the twelfth century. The novella’s protagonist, the twenty-three-year-old student Rotbaf Luden, has developed a personality that inhabits many locations and assumes many identities, or rather, inhabits a discontinuous space and assumes a discontinuous identity. She is a child of the Galician/azerrata diaspora in Spanish America. Rotbaf is a citizen of the presumably independent island of Anatí (one of Terra Ancha’s former colonies overseas), in which a cosmopolitan and neocolonial bourgeois society thrives by reproducing the ethnic and class differences inherited from the colonial regime and its metropolitan center. Her family has been able to associate freely with the island’s intellectual and economic elites.

At the same time, Rotbaf has preserved her parents’ azerrata heritage and resisted creolization through her reading of plays about Tagen Ata’s armed struggle for independence from Terra Ancha and her constant participation in patriotic events (Retorno 52–54). In other words, Rotbaf belongs to an immigrant community that has quickly achieved economic success without allowing its collective/national identity to be diluted. As a member of a self-complacent and economically privileged minority, she grew up used to being served by ethnic subalterns—blacks and mulattoes—while nurturing in her mind the persona of a contradictory expatriate partisan. Spurred by the azerratas’ “mysticism of the dominated” [mística do dominado] and “ethnic self-complacency” [autosatisfacción étnica], she declares herself ready—and willing—to make the ultimate sacrifice for an imagined nation which in her mind she never left: “this was indeed a return to Tagen Ata, where I had always been” [tratábase dun retorno a Tagen Ata, onde eu tiña estado sempre] (Retorno 54). Her parents, we are told, are considerably less belligerent: “they had always lived on the ghetto’s edge, with one foot in the neocolonial and cosmopolitan society of arrival, and another in the endogamic rituals of the azerrata community. They beheld with a mixture of affectionate irony and proud respect my interest in studying comparative linguistics and my devotion to the tasks that the I.T.A. assigned me” [Habitaran sempre no límite xusto do ghetto, cun pé na sociedade cosmopolita neocolonial e outro nos rituais endogámicos da colectividade azerrata, e contemplaban, cunha mestura de ironía afectuosa e orgulloso respeto, a mina adicación aos mesteres da I.T.A. e o meu interese nos estudos de lingüística comparada] (Retorno 54). Upon arriving in her ancestors’ homeland, Rotbaf is shocked to discover that azerratas are stratified according

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to their trade and geographical origins, so much so that unskilled peasants who migrated from the country to the city are treated by fellow compatriots in a harsher way than mulatto servants in Anatí were treated by the creole elites of azerrata descent. She also discovers that upwardly mobile manual laborers do not support the “‘classic nationalism’” [nacionalismo clásico]—also called ethnonationalism in the academic literature—still advocated by the Irmandades de Tagen Ata or I.T.A. (Retorno 69).

According to Ferrín, classic nationalism constructed the fiction that the community of azerrata speakers is an organic corporation in which all societal groups are equitably represented according to their talents and professions. In other words, the privileged minorities of Tagen Ata have sublimated their domination of the subaltern class into a pastoral of defeat by which they all feel equally oppressed by a mutual external enemy—Terra Ancha—marked as foreign. Ethnonationalism thus appears as the producer of a monologic consciousness that suppresses all other differential factors, including class consciousness. Ferrín was the first Galician author who turned classic nationalism’s inability to address adequately the workers’ desire to emancipate themselves from capitalist exploitation into a main focus of his fiction without letting either nationalism or revolutionary Marxism dominate the remaining indices of local differentiation.

What Bakhtin says about Dostoevsky’s characters can be applied to Ferrín’s: in their conversations and interactions, “they never argue over sepa-rate points, but always over whole points of view, inserting themselves and their entire idea into even the briefest exchange” (Problems 96). Take the example of Bretaña, Esmeraldina. The novel adopts the form of a lengthy and digressive letter written over the course of many years (as is revealed on 239) in which the incarcerated Amaury K. regularly apostrophizes his beloved, Esmeraldina; he mixes the conventions of courtly literature with his fragmen-tary memories and with minute accounts of the conversations that take place around him in prison regarding the plotting of a mass uprising. Since Amaury K. suffers from a memory disorder and doubts his own identity, a number of fantastic beings and ghostly alter egos (from talking birds to dead Breton bishops and wartime collaborationistes) take turns in undermining the pro-tagonist-narrator’s control over his first-person account. A vast fresco of opin-ions casts light on Tagen Ata’s political present and possible futures. Furthermore, no resolution of the existing social conflicts is provided as the narrative teasingly moves the reader closer to the imminent onset of a revo-lutionary process whose organizing details and larger goals remain unspeci-fied.6 In this manner, the revolution as event may resist appropriation by a single party just as dialogic discourses resist monologic denouements.

This strategy is reminiscent of metapolitical philosophy’s recommenda-tion that the political faithful wait with religious fervor for the advent of a fortuitous cataclysmic occurrence, which they may consider embracing regardless of how it presents itself because in principle it does not conform

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to any totalitarian or state power due to its very unpredictability. Understood as an event, this moment of historical catastrophe may come to signify the possibility of truly self-emancipating breaks in the status quo, of a commu-nity randomly rising above particular interests at an eruption of maximal intensity. It has also come to signify, from the poststructuralist perspective that textualizes revolutionary politics, the felicitous environment for an emerging subject who stays “faithful to the event”—a purely hazardous “évé-nement” whose occurrence is not necessarily inferred from a preexisting situation or surrounding context—and strives for the realization of the “mul-tiple” yet “indecisive” new possibilities opened up by this radical break (Badiou 215).

The new subject and new truth do not exist objectively, but rather are constructed in relation to the event through a loyalty born out of faith (fidélité) to the prospect of the as-yet unrealized occurrence. For Badiou, Christ’s resurrection constitutes the canonical event, while the Pauline conversion to the wait for this Second Coming and Paul’s unfulfilled witnessing to it constitute the subject and the truth in fidelity to the event. For Ferrín, the return of King Arthur provides the pattern of continuity without conclusion—fidelity—required to legitimate and give shape to an otherwise fortuitous moment of rupture: in Bretaña, the prison inmate Lins Leabertkolm deliberately nourishes an “Arthurian” charisma as “Messiah” and revolutionary icon from the isolation cell that he will escape one day to lead a nation-wide uprising (266). Ferrín’s constant play on Tagen Ata’s analogies with Celtic-Breton lore is supported by Galicia’s belonging in the Atlantic sisterhood of the legendary Seven Celtic Nations. Ferrín’s dialogic project appropriates rhetorical strategies drawn from typology, folklore, philology, and the medieval love lyric, as well as from such narrative genres as the political thriller, the quest romance, the adventure tale, the Bildungsroman, and the fantastic. Through the interchangeability of Galicia’s and Brittany’s respective political histories, traditional repositories, and present social conditions, Ferrín de-essentializes and decenters the claims to transcendental identity made by classic sub-state nationalism.

For an example in Ferrín of the Bakhtinian decentering of individual consciousness, let us turn to Retorno’s protagonist. Rotbaf is a recent univer-sity graduate and seems to withdraw regularly into a twilight zone in which fragmentary memories alternate with an iron will to change a status quo whose roots she does not fully understand. Above all, she only intimates intermittently her complicity with the structures of economic domination either in her native island of Anatí or in her family’s ancestral Tagen Ata. We immediately realize that her desire for a nation of her own creation becomes confused with her repressed sexual desires, a topic about which a mid-Transition feminist, the journalist and novelist Montserrat Roig (a former member of the Catalan Communist Party [PSUC]), was to write at length in her collection of articles and interviews, ¿Tiempo de mujer? (1980), while

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philosopher José Luis Aranguren devoted to it briefer comments in Sobre imagen, identidad y heterodoxia (1981). In contrast with Rotbaf’s polymor-phous emotional intensity, her parents are said to have been “merry, young, and skeptical” [ledos, xovens e escépticos] (Retorno 54). Through the character of Rotbaf, the novel romanticizes revolutionary politics and sexual liberation, a two-way process that was dramatized in the same decade by such novels of de-conversion from revolutionary militancy (or novels of belated, half-hearted conversion to it) by Carlos Casares (Xoguetes pra un tempo prohi-bido [1973]), Luis Goytisolo (Recuento [1974]), José María Guelbenzu (La noche en casa [1977]), and Roig (L’hora violeta [1980]).

Many of the piercing ironies contained in Ferrín’s novella are directed against Rotbaf and her main antagonist and object of her exuberant sexual desires, the charismatic azerrata intellectual Ulm Roan. Rotbaf and Ulm are exactly 17 years apart, like Ferrín and Piñeiro. Since the latter’s prologue to Ferrín’s short-story collection O crepúsculo e as formigas (1961) constitutes one of the last publishing enterprises in which mentor and protégé actively collaborated, one may even conjecture that Retorno a Tagen Ata is, among many other things, both a roman à clef and an acting-out of Ferrín’s ultimate breakup with Piñeiro in the sixties.7 Note also that the last five letters of “Ulm Roan” feature an anagram of “Ramón.” Neither character seems bothered by the class divisions underlying the facile distinction each makes between a galeguista and a non-galeguista consciousness, so much so that the narrative takes delight in flaunting the blind spots in their respective positions. It is to Ferrín’s credit that he turns the rapports between protagonist and antagonist—between Rotbaf and Ulm—into an occasion for a dialogic exchange without letting cultural galeguismo absorb its revolutionary nemesis or vice versa. To paraphrase Bakhtin, in an open-ended narrative “whole” such as Retorno, in which all social classes and degrees of commitment to agendas for change are paraded before the readers’ eyes, the heterogeneity of the discrete smaller totalities—of each “voice” and its “world”—is not subsumed into a mono-logic discourse.8

The politics of nostalgia for the lost nation is also called into question. Thus, Ferrín makes Ulm Roan not only the former leader of a clandestine party he has just dissolved—the Irmandades de Tagen Ata—but also a poeta da saudade and (like the author and many of his other characters) a romance philologist in his own right.9 The saudade poetics projects the immutable wholeness of the nation into a monolithic past; it construes the historical sliding of the long-lost past into the present as a series of alienating ruptures that become paradoxically enabling conditions for the essentializing of a national identity whose intensity becomes stronger as the emotional suffer-ing also becomes accentuated. The meaning of the nation’s future is given, as it were, in advance, as happens with God’s names in patristic exegesis.10 The rhetoric of saudade is rooted in the expectation that one’s prospect of reaching emotional plenitude may be directly enabled by the contemplation

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of a regained landscape and a homeland whose earlier absence had unleashed a negative yet authentically profound intensity. While saudade functions alternately as an affective landscape and an ideology of monologic restitution, it may also be used by the oppressed subject as a strategy to break out of oppression, as happens with the imprisoned protagonist in Bretaña, Esmeraldina, or with Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao’s seminal essay, Sempre en Galiza (1944).

Ferrín makes Rotbaf a prospective graduate student in linguistics for at least two reasons. The first one is to expose as problematic her all-too-ready equations of original language and original nation (one of the blind spots shared by nineteenth-century philology and classic nationalism). The second reason is to explore Rotbaf’s conversion from aspiring organic intellectual to clandestine activist and Ulm Roan’s surprising conversion (in Rotbaf’s eyes) from organic to traditional intellectual. As a child growing up in Anatí, Rotbaf became infatuated with the idealized literary image of an Ulm Roan whom she had not yet met, but whom she was ready to embrace as a national poet, an academic mentor, a political leader, and a lover. In the course of Retorno a Tagen Ata, she experiences a dream in which she kills her love interest shortly after they meet and have made love in the imperti-nent and loquacious manner of a French new-wave film. This is her way of saying quietly to herself that she must not yield to the temptation of letting her philologist’s budding career and emotional vulnerability be instrumen-talized by the watered-down cultural regionalism now advocated by Ulm Roan/ Ramón Piñeiro. Tagen Ata will indeed be described in the later novel, Bretaña, Esmeraldina, as a nation “despicably regionalized by Terra Ancha’s republican regime” [vilmente rexionalizado polo rexime republicano de Terra Ancha] (11).

Rotbaf seems to realize that Ulm Roan—as the embodiment of the cos-mopolitan Galician letrado—wishes to remain symbolically in control of a process of cultural emancipation that is purely belletristic. This is one of the goals that Piñeiro attempted to accomplish in his pseudo-Heideggerian essays, which Ferrín caricaturizes with undissimulated irony. Sociology’s empirical method, Ulm reasons in a declamatory speech to Rotbaf, is “blind to the vibrating flames and to the radical experiencing of the absolute … Poets can still lead their fatherland. At forty I realize that all I can do is to write poems. And save the essences: our vernacular language. I know well that I cannot save the nation” [cego á chama vibradoira do esprito e á radical vivencia do absoluto … Inda os poetas poden dirixir as patrias. Aos corenta anos decátome de que non podo facer outramente que poemas. E salvar as esencias: a fala. Non podo salvar ao país, ben o sei] (Retorno 75).11 Shortly afterwards Ulm Roan makes a half-hearted attempt at de-essentializing his position, calling it—in a direct reference to the ethics of compromise or cooptation adopted by numerous liberal-minded intellectuals under Franco to begin in the 1960s the protracted process of apertura from within the

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system—a “realism or possibilism” [realismo, ou posibilismo] (Retorno 77). At the same time, throughout the novella Ulm Roan expresses his disdain for Tagen Ata’s politically active manual laborers, who may choose to speed up changes from outside by means of an armed uprising. These industrial work-ers are for Ferrín the latent enemy of the emerging culturalist bourgeoisie. They constitute the main leftist threat to the possibilist local élites’ hegemonic position as Terra Ancha’s privileged interlocutors in the project of limited shared governance or autonomía (Retorno 81).

Ferrín’s novella suggests that the growth of the azerrata language may result in the separation of the literary register, artificially recovered and administered by the culturalist intelligentsia, from its colloquial counter-part—the fictive equivalent of the authentic yet impure and mongrel Galician spoken by the peasants. In the 1960s the latter register was beautifully styl-ized (without adhering to Piñeiro’s or Otero Pedrayo’s hyperculturalist dis-course) by poet Manuel María and novelist Xosé Neira Vilas—both socio-realist writers. The connection between standardizing an intellectualized version of the vernacular language and building a moderately autonomous, self-differentiated país (Ulm Roan and Piñeiro’s nondescript word for “nation,” which harks back to Enlightenment regionalism’s Amigos do País societies founded in the course of the centralizing eighteenth century) naturalizes class differences within an azerrata community organized around a dubious meritocracy.12 Significantly, Ulm Roan continues to romanticize his chosen role as inspired bard of a pre-political nation and the arch-mediator of a bilingual lettered city in which the growing equality between the languages is not accompanied by shared sovereignty between sub-state authorities (azerrata/Galician) and state ones, let alone by the narrowing of the class differences theretofore justified by an unequal yet legitimate distribution of wealth. The novella ends with Rotbaf forgoing her chance to assassinate the traitor Ulm. She simply abandons him after writing a paradoxical note in which she states both her unabated love for him and her revulsion at his treason, as if she were sublimating her sexual attraction to Ulm Roan into the nationalist creed that he once may have sincerely espoused.13

The ending also features what one may call an instance of interclass solidarity. Medieval romances greatly idealize the relationship between the courtly knight-errant (who stands at one end of the culture continuum) and the “wild man” to the detriment of the burgher’s quick socio-economic ascent. What Tagen Ata’s peasants and déclassé nationalists-turned-guerrilleiros or revolutionaries have in common is that they speak azerrata/ Galician and do not see the bureaucratic apparatuses of Terra Ancha/ Castilian-centric Spain as a hospitable framework for the realization of their national aspirations, which have been “despicably regionalized” for too long.

At the close of Retorno a Tagen Ata, Rotbaf flamboyantly borrows a horse from the peasant freedom-fighters who work as neo-feudal servants in Ulm Roan’s household to ride into Tagen Ata’s magic forest—the “Grande

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Fraga.” In this forest, which takes up 60 percent of Tagen Ata’s surface, the knight Percival, an Arthurian symbol in the colonized nation’s prophetic cycle, also finds his strength each time he is able to return from the world of the dead. The forest will in later works (Arnoia, Arnoia [1985] and Bretaña, Esmeraldina [1987]) be called symbolically “Brocelianda” by reference to Chrétien de Troyes’s quest romances. Conceived as a sort of minor Purgatory, the forest is riddled with treacherous passages that test the hero’s determina-tion as he/she withdraws from culture to find a new space beyond nature’s arcane world.14 Indeed, the last few pages of Retorno a Tagen Ata feature the first joint appearance of the world of medieval chivalry and the world of the nationalist struggle for political independence, a powerful combination that is at the basis of Ferrín’s masterpiece, Bretaña, Esmeraldina.

Bretaña expands on storylines already presented in the novellas Retorno a Tagen Ata and Arnoia, Arnoia as well as short stories such as the Kafkaesque “Familia de agrimensores” (1980) and the now canonical “Amor de Artur” (1982). Ferrín’s individual works dealing with Tagen Ata do not feature an internal linear chronology nor does their order of publication follow the unfolding of Tagen Ata’s fictional history from the distant past forward. Bretaña, Esmeraldina features the novelty that the armed guerrilla first presented in Retorno now constitutes just one of three existential domains of dissent fully displayed in the novel. A second domain is “Bretaña” (this sub-state nation’s history, ethnographic realities, and literary traditions), which stands in an ambiguous referential relation to “Tagen Ata.” Is Amaury K. a Breton-born philologist specializing in Tagen Ata’s vernacular language and culture, who at some point joined the azerrata resistance, as he thinks he has? Or is he an azerrata-born philologist in love with all things Breton, who finds in this rich foreign lore consolation for the torture he has suffered in the prison system of an autonomous Tagen Ata? The internationalist strat-egy at work in the novel precludes a definitive answer to this question. The third existential domain is that of medieval and ancient myths, which exist outside history and predate the constitution of Terra Ancha as a state in the later Middle Ages.

The method of composition used in Bretaña, Esmeraldina corresponds to what has been called the “ethnographic-surrealist” mode (in James L. Clifford’s designation, which uses Georges Bataille’s Eurocentric descriptions of non-European social worlds as his main example) or the “neofantástico” (in Jaime Alazraki’s, which uses Cortázar’s “La noche boca arriba” and “Axolotl” as its quintessential examples). Through this strategy, Ferrín elimi-nates existing hierarchies between wakeful and dream-like experiences: he defamiliarizes the protagonist’s—and the reader’s—immediate surroundings (the here-and-now of Tagen Ata/ Galicia becomes unmoored) while approx-imating the exotic world as if it inhabited the reader’s here-and-now. At the same time, he points out that Bretaña is his symbol for repressed and uncon-secrated national identities worldwide whose cultural specificity and right to

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self-determination should not be denied. “Bretaña” accordingly directs the reader’s attention to the protagonist’s immersion in an intermittent, book-length rêverie triggered off by the guerrilleiro-protagonist’s efforts at remem-bering his true identity. He not only suffers post-traumatic memory disorders caused by his police detention, but he also needs to escape the harsh reali-ties of a lifelong incarceration by fleeing into a parallel world of the imagina-tion, which his status as erudite philologist makes realistic.

Ferrín’s constant concern with parallel worlds of the mind—with spatial alterities and the ontology of fiction—is complemented by his attention to Galicia’s accelerated urban transformation. Among the themes from the six-ties fictionalized in Retorno a Tagen Ata is the growth of the cities’ arrabal-dos or inter-class residential suburbs, where industrious blue-collar workers and the progressive middle class live side by side. Rotbaf’s aunt, Natalia, belongs to the second group of arrabaldo residents. The aunt had first appeared under the name “Natalia Olsen” in Ferrín’s Arrabaldo do norte (1964), an understudied novel in which Galicia is allegorized as a newly urbanized district located to the north of an expanding town and increas-ingly adjacent to it.15 Once urbanized, that pagus in the north continues to grow without losing its social and anthropological specificity. The essence of the arrabaldo remains a mystery for outsiders, who are nonetheless mysteri-ously drawn to it (Arrabaldo 36–37). In this threshold locality, seemingly unmotivated and absurd tensions arise between a troubled stranger coming from a southern village and a native of the northern extension, who brutally beats up the visitor after the latter insists on searching the local resident’s home—he had previously searched Natalia Olsen’s—without an apparent motive other than his otherwise inexplicably inquisitive obsession (Arrabaldo 117–24). The shift from Arrabaldo do norte to Retorno a Tagen Ata enacts a transition from what R.-M. Albérès once memorably called the roman de l’homme traqué or novel of social and existential alienation to the novel of revolution, from erratic and enigmatic acts carried out on impulse to actions and counter-actions which are sometimes planned, sometimes hazardous.16

In Retorno a Tagen Ata, Natalia states that both social groups living in the arrabaldo—the upwardly mobile blue-collar workers and the progressive, intellectually inclined middle class—are almost immune to the attraction of nationalist parties. The reason for this is that they have long identified their desire for freedom with the utopian emancipation of labor and with women’s liberation worldwide rather than with the sub-state nation’s growing independence from the central state apparatuses, a project riddled with socio-political pitfalls and ambiguities.17 Tagen Ata’s large-scale agricultural production units appear to be in the hands of absentee landlords, so that the peasantry has been reduced to the status of neo-feudal subalternity. The featured country dwellers include “peasants—servants, farm tenants, and salaried workers” [campesiños—criados, caseiros e xornaleiros] rather than small proprietors (Retorno 81). Ulm Roan sophistically justifies the rustics’

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oppression by invoking the ownership rights consecrated in ius naturale, an unwritten charter of paradoxically inalienable rights that the modern liberal-democratic state should not accept. He also accuses the subalternized population—here Ferrín takes a jab at Piñeiro’s unreasonable hatred of Marxism—of seeking a “fraternal alliance with industrial workers, who are—as you know—poisoned” [contubernio fraternal cos operarios industriais, que están—xa sabes—envelenados] (Retorno 81). In other words, those who are not landowners become potential runaway rebels—cimarróns is the argot term favored by Ulm Roan—against both Terra Ancha’s authorities and the regionalist caciques, who feel entitled (like Ulm Roan) to tell the improvident peasantry what to think and how to endure passively their nuda vita or bare life.

For Ferrín, an effective form of resistance to the alliance forged by Terra Ancha’s authorities with Tagen Ata’s coopted privileged minorities would have to involve a counter-alliance formed also according to the logic of equivalences. This cordial entente would feature the progressive lower- middle classes (aunt Natalia and others like her), factory workers (who in the novel appear to profess either a Marxist or an anarchist ideology), and those cimarróns who may remain loyal to the radicalized expatriate azerratas (i.e., the Galicia Exterior) that produced Rotbaf. An anti-systemic coalition is thus formed by self-differentiated constituencies which historically have had trou-ble uniting their efforts in a common front unless they became aware first of having a common oppressor. The utopian aspiration found in Ferrín’s politi-cal fictions is linked to his anti-statist stance as citizen. In Bretaña, Esmeraldina, it becomes apparent that the protagonist-narrator’s enemy—Terra Ancha—is a liberal state organized in the form of a parliamentary democracy in which minorities have been voted down. In no other institu-tionally correct setting would the impending recognition of a small nation’s right to implement bilingual education and to administrative autonomy be possible.18 Despite these advances, Amaury K. joined Tagen Ata’s armed resistance to Terra Ancha’s rule.

In making his partisan protagonists fight against a republican legal order in both novels, Ferrín draws attention to the arbitrariness and contin-gency of the state’s jurisprudence and executive decisions. Only the sover-eign state can turn rights into laws. But in order to do this, it has to conceal the violence inherent in the originating moment of transforming exceptions to the former legal order into foundational or instituting moments of the new order according to the logic of decisionistic action.19 The legal status quo agreed upon by Ulm Roan’s regionalists and Terra Ancha’s central government—the dystopian estado das autonomías that Ferrín was able to envision almost while in prison in 1970—would be illegitimate to the extent that it was not sanctioned by the higher authority represented by the dia-sporic yet highly organized azerrata nation. Although Ferrín presents this nation in the guise of a legitimate and long-standing corporation, it can only

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be found scattered through multiple locations in the Americas and Tagen Ata’s rural parishes. This large constituency would have opposed the down-grading of nationalism to regionalism in exchange for minor concessions in the sub-state enclave’s right to cultural self-expression. What Ferrín has been promoting throughout his writing career is Galicia’s right to self-government and self-determination.

FERRÍN’S RETURNS: DIS-ALIENATION, UNFINISHED REVOLUTIONS, OPEN-ENDED NARRATIVES

In Retorno, Tagen Ata’s regionalist/nationalist bourgeoisie and working class appear to have competing economic and political interests despite consider-ing themselves equally disenfranchised in relation to Terra Ancha’s bureau-cratic class. The two groups might indeed have fought on opposite sides in a different institutional context. Similarly, although Rotbaf may call her par-ents and her aunt Natalia “skeptical” (this is Ferrín’s revealing word to describe the older members of her family), and consider Ulm Roan a traitor, she still accepts that each represents an alternative manner of feeling azer-rata, that is to say, galeguista. The implications of this acknowledgment are, first, that rebellion and affirmation are for Ferrín the two sides of belonging to a community or a nation; and second, that authentic communities offer their members multiple opportunities for alienation as much as identifica-tion. With dis-alienation comes also dis-identification: a floating, unmoored self is produced when the energies previously channeled into resisting an external power become dispersed and erratic once that power disappears or ceases to be perceived as oppressive.20 In Ferrín’s novels, the salaried middle class is challenged to ride the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm (not just progressivism in the abstract), which from Marx to various post-Stalinist ver-sions of the class struggle transcends the strategic stage of interclass solidar-ity to become a general aspiration of the human condition. In Spain, the breakup between anti-capitalist persuasions and the larger, multi-group struggle for greater equality took place in the wake of the 1979 election, which did not bring the revolutionary socialists of the PSOE the desired per-centage of votes, forcing the party to move to the center in preparation for its momentous victory at the 1982 general election.

In Retorno a Tagen Ata, Ferrín makes heuristic use of anachronisms and takes literary liberties that at times render the identification of Galicia with Tagen Ata problematic. For example, his azerratas are divided into at least four social groups: first, there is the class of entrepreneurs and their nearly invisible intellectuals and bureaucrats who have long supported, and bene-fited from, Terra Ancha’s domination. Second, there is the class of salaried, gradually less exploited laborers, such as “the skilled workers who reside in the city’s northern extension and form perhaps the azerrata society’s most

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dynamic sector” [os operarios que residen no arrabaldo do Norte e constitúen, se acaso, o sector máis dinámico da sociedade azerrata] (Retorno 69). These upwardly mobile citizens have turned their backs on nationalist platforms because classic ethnonationalism does not represent their class interests qua workers. Third, there are the ubiquitous and impoverished peasants who do not own the land and are downgraded in large numbers to the subaltern position of “servants” (criados). And fourth, there is the nationalist intelligen-tsia, whose ranks Rotbaf had for several years longed to join upon arrival in Tagen Ata despite the increasing divide between two distinct factions: on one hand, the culturalist side—the fictional counterpart to the historical piñeiristas—aiming to assert its cultural self-differentiation but not necessar-ily to achieve administrative autonomy; and on the other, the more belliger-ent galeguistas do exterior, who still push for the treatment of Galicia as a sub-state “nation” in Castelao’s federalist manner.

At times Ferrín makes painstaking efforts to describe, and even analyze, the changing institutions of Tagen Ata vis-à-vis those of Anatí, and especially Terra Ancha, which are historicized from one novel or story to the next in the evolving cycle that constitutes la matière de Tagen Ata. Still, the few crit-ics who have dared to engage this side of Ferrín’s output have cavalierly called it an ahistorical fantasy on the ground that it does not really describe any recognizable sub-state nation. But does it? Contrary to what one conser-vative critic surmises, Ferrín’s attention to the features of a parallel fictive universe endowed with a paradoxical chronology of its own does not betray a “millenarian fear of history” or an absolute preference for a politically “mobilizing myth” over the claims of “history” and a more “comprehensive imagination.”21 Rather, this displacement, like the author’s allegorization of his philologist-activist self in a female alter ego and of Latin America’s large Galician community in “Anatí,” fulfilled the twofold purpose of escaping cen-sorship and implementing important distancing devices. Such strategies make the story resonate beyond its immediate contexts of composition while simultaneously attenuating the Galician reader’s cathartic investment in it.

Ferrín’s main departures from a realistic depiction of social structures in the Iberian northwest also include the obliteration of the institution of mini-fundium and the near-invisibility of Terra Ancha’s natives and of politically unengaged azerratas. The central government’s repressive state apparatuses seem almost invisible, which is also the case in Torrente’s counter- revolutionary Transition novel set in Santiago de Compostela/ Villasanta de la Estrella—Fragmentos de Apocalipsis. In Tagen Ata, all the peasants are conveniently landless and impecunious. This massive subalternizing of the country-dwelling population would explain why they have been won over in very large numbers to the cause of either communism or left-wing nation-alism. It also seems to be part of Ferrín’s strategy to counter the discourse of fear advanced by right-wing parties during the Second Republic. In the thir-ties, the regionalist right wing consistently played the red scare card, telling

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modest landholders and proprietors that they were like any other landowner (large or small) in a weak and flawed case of equivalential logic. Even the cattle that yeomen and farm hands might own would be snatched away by left-wing nationalists should the latter ever come to power. Moreover, Retorno a Tagen Ata features a slightly archaic fabric of social relations. In Terra Ancha there seems to be little upward mobility, which makes it all the more urgent for peasants, miners, and factory workers to become revolutionaries. The fact that these groups remain disunited as the novel reaches its conclu-sion attests to Ferrín’s interest in resisting the resolution of dialogic variables into a monologic discourse.

The revolutionary forms of political militancy that Rotbaf expected to find when she arrived in a gradually regionalized Tagen Ata have in fact been replaced by the triumphant consensus politics embodied in Terra Ancha’s cooptation of sub-state nationalisms. In her ancestors’ land she is welcomed by her liberated aunt, Natalia, a “skeptical and mundane intel-lectual” [intelectual escéptica e mundana] (Retorno 63). Natalia appears to be another romance philologist who looks down on Proust and rambles about the latest Prix Goncourt, possibly an author in the nouveau roman mode (an aesthetics that Ferrín had intertextualized in his earlier fiction, as noted above). Unlike Rotbaf’s parents and Ulm Roan, Aunt Natalia does not have any servants. Since Rotbaf hails from a highly stratified Spanish-American society that she has internalized as second nature, she does not seem bothered in the least by the class differences that some of her region-alist interlocutors in Tagen Ata have kept in place. To her credit, she also seems aware that her romanticizing of personal attachments and political affiliations often gets in the way of her best judgment. At the close of the narrative, she rides into the forest on a horse provided by Ulm Roan’s ser-vants, who are infiltrated cimarróns and whom he embarrasses by making them wear the Galician rustic’s folkloric attire in an urban setting. In this manner, the narrative pits her—the representative of the idealistic and ideal-ized Galicia Exterior—and the radicalized peasantry against Ulm Roan’s coopted neo-regionalists, Terra Ancha’s central state, and de-nationalizing capitalist forces.

In riding off on her horse, Rotbaf dialectically negates her belonging to a mildly dissenting yet privileged group which has forgone its opportunity to fight for something other than the mere survival of Tagen Ata’s language (Ulm Roan’s position) in a situation of di-lingüismo or institutionally sanc-tioned diglossia. The difference involved in this negation features both an element of contrariety and one of contradiction to the extent that she risks alienating herself from her utopian resolve to combat Terra Ancha, for which purpose she first needs to dialectize Tagen Ata’s abject regionalism. Although there is no indication in the text that she has already become a Marxist revo-lutionary (we infer that she does in the later novel, Bretaña, Esmeraldina), she vows to join the nationalist “Resistencia” awaiting her at the end of her

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passage through the forest. The novella moves from the expatriation of Rotbaf’s moderate parents in Anatí to her inner self-exile in the Grande Fraga immediately following her arrival in Tagen Ata. Her “return” is not so much to the fatherland as it is to the independentist activism betrayed by Ulm Roan. In fact, only one page is spent on narrating her journey from Anatí to Tagen Ata. The symbolism of the homecoming journey is concentrated instead on her venturing into the Grande Fraga. In other words, the only “return” still open to Rotbaf involves her sustained antagonizing and even-tual defeat of Terra Ancha’s state institutions after her extraordinary prise de conscience, which also entails an Oedipal/generational rebellion against the parental authority embodied by Ulm Roan.22

Rotbaf effectively separates herself from the coopted local intelligentsia by venturing into a Brocelianda of the mind out of which she may emerge (or not) a new political subject ready to forge destabilizing alliances between the internationalist representatives of the working class and nationalist patri-ots like herself. As a result of her ambivalent responsiveness to class issues, Retorno a Tagen Ata resists offering an easy solution to the problem of how to insert a vector of egalitarian inclusiveness into an advance-guard intelli-gentsia’s legitimate desire for national self-determination. To quote Immanuel Wallerstein’s incisive words: “For more than a hundred years, the world Left has bemoaned its dilemma that the world’s workers have all too often orga-nized themselves in ‘people’ forms. But this is not a soluble dilemma. It derives from the contradictions of the system. There cannot be für sich class activity that is entirely divorced from people-based political activity” (85). Ferrín’s narrative works correlate what Wallerstein calls “people” forms with “novel” forms. They attempt the dialogic hybridizing of the novel of revolu-tion with the female Bildungsroman and the medieval quest romance (signi-fied by Rotbaf’s horse ride into Brocelianda and the symbolic landscape that defines la matière de Tagen Ata), which have historically been antagonistic to the modes of partisan political fiction.

In Retorno a Tagen Ata, Ferrín decisively defers and displaces the outcome of the revolution into the realm of the fantastic understood as the dimension in which the reader’s rationalistic criteria for separating the plausible from the implausible become ineffectual. In later works, he will increase the number of intertextualized genres and conventions that make multiple collateral branches grow out of the main plot. Bretaña, Esmeraldina thus becomes more than a simple novel. It is also a veritable encyclopedia of “novel” forms and forms of starting a revolutionary process. Taken collectively, Ferrín’s narratives set in Tagen Ata constitute an intriguing fictionalization of the dilemma posed by Wallerstein: which should come first, nation-making projects or revolutionary actions? At the same time, they transculturate the exhausted novel-of-revolution mode into more marketable forms of metafiction, which Ferrín first encountered in Julio Cortázar, Cunqueiro, and Torrente Ballester.

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As French philosophers began to cast the fatigue of Leninist commu-nism in the form of a fin de l’histoire (as in Henri Lefebvre’s book of that title published in 1970), the novel of revolution slowly but surely gave way to a new revolution in the novel form whereby history was no longer treated as the unproblematic realm of vulgar materialism. In fact, as we move from Retorno a Tagen Ata (1971) to Bretaña, Esmerladina (1987), we notice a shift from the nostalgia for the transparency that history had for earlier Marxist writers toward the acceptance of history’s multi-layered textuality without renouncing the claims that each dimension of experience makes on the politically responsive citizen-reader. Ferrín has not published a new novel about Tagen Ata since 1987. However, his influence can be traced in the recent fiction of Antón Lopo, a.k.a. Antón Rodríguez López. In Lopo’s Obediencia (2010), a female mathematician living in the 2125 city-state of “Compostela” escapes from the bucolic mental asylum to which she has been confined to join another “Resistencia” called “Alogon.” Elba Mácara, as this alienated woman is named, does not venture into Rotbaf’s environmen-tally friendly Grande Fraga, but into the polluted and lawless “Alemparte” (the “place-beyond” in a Galicia severed from its former administrative capi-tal), where biopolitics performs its work of revealing the non-citizens’ bare life in all its vulnerabilty and dispossession. Lopo’s bleak allegory of how central and peripheral nationalisms alike have contributed to precipitating a worldwide military Apocalypse and Empire’s global domination is focused on the dwarfed city-state’s creation and monitoring of memories (both per-sonal and collective) through a chargeable device called “memory steam,” which has now been implanted in the human body. In the Compostela of the twenty-second century, each citizen’s lived memories are mixed with other recollections, which are programmed, purchased or otherwise acquired without the mediation of a preexisting lived experience.

Obediencia also speaks to such environmental crises as global warming and the disappearance of drinking water, as well as the power of technology to produce the mirage of its own resistance. Both the official regime and its outlawed other—Alogon—are ultimately generated and regulated by a super-computer called “Superorganismo” and the mathematician-technocrats involved with its development. Galicia’s present administrative capital is all that is left of the independent República Galega, to which an unspecified Confederación provides military protection. The city is no longer the destina-tion of peaceful Catholic pilgrims, but houses instead a thriving weapon industry in a world permanently at war, while Castilian ceased to be spoken in the Iberian Peninsula except for some “primitive villages in Cantabria’s mountains” [primitivas aldeas das montañas cántabras] (Lopo 210).

In moving from Ferrín to Lopo (who is also a member of Redes Escarlatas and a prolific journalist), we shift from political fiction to science fiction to witness a complementary critique of globalization’s technological teleologies and relative indifference to environmental, demographic, and human rights

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crises. Additionally, Ferrín’s and Lopo’s novels can be treated as agents of discursive resistance to the enforced uniformity of Empire because they chal-lenge the Galician nationalist reader to eschew the notorious falsifications of the past often found, on the one hand, in official histories of the Spanish state and its sub-state nations, and, on the other hand, in more recent histo-riographic metafictions that either oppose or consecrate the relations between center and periphery.23

Furthermore, the three novels under discussion enact each an interven-tion in the power/resistance binomial that structures revolutionary actions: first, resistance movements may try to bring about a mass uprising in the romantic belief that the heterogeneous claims of history, nation, and class can be made to coincide with the demands of a polymorphous and evolving present (Retorno); second, the event of the revolution may happen—if it ever does—in tandem with a system of domination that is divided against itself and therefore allows for random reshufflings in the balance of forces (Bretaña); and third, the system itself may strategically create the simula-crum of a resistance movement which the oppressed naïvely embrace of their own accord (Obediencia). In conclusion: Ferrín and Lopo seem espe-cially interested in channeling existing social energies into the open-ended project of envisioning the plural futures that may (or may not) be available to us in our ever fragile civil society. For reasons both aesthetic and political, Ferrín’s body of work certainly deserves—as does Lopo’s—greater critical attention in Galicia and elsewhere.

NOTES

1. See Salgado and Casado (128–33) for Ferrín’s own partial account of this process. I mention Piñeiro here because Ferrín used him as inspiration for the character of Ulm Roan, the regionalist leader who betrays radical nationalism in Retorno a Tagen Ata. Ferrín’s continues to be a minority perspective on Piñeiro, who has elicited countless hagiographic treatments in moderate nationalist circles (e.g., Fernández del Riego 11–13; González Tosar).

2. Between 1964 and 1980 Ferrín alternated relatively brief stays in prison with his high-school teach-ing of French and the co-founding of such radical political parties as UPG-Unión do Pobo Galego (cre-ated in 1963 and formally established in 1964), Unión do Pobo Galego-liña proletaria (1977), Partido Galego do Proletariado (1978), and the Organización de Liberación Nacional “Galicia Ceibe” (1979). Ferrín’s chivalric stories of Breton inspiration have enjoyed enduring popularity: “Percival” (1958), where the author shows himself at his most cunqueirán, and “Amor de Artur” (1982) are the two best known. By contrast, his politically driven output continues to be severely understudied due to its uncomfortable links to radical nationalism. In 2009 he ran for election to the Parlamento de Galicia on the ticket of the independentist party Frente Popular Galega, which obtained only .17% (that is “point seventeen percent”) of the popular vote. To this day he remains the editor of the quarterly journal A Trabe de Ouro. Revista Galega de Pensamento Crítico (which he founded in 1990) and the guiding light of a neo-avant-garde group for social and artistic activism called Redes Escarlata, which he launched in 2001.

3. The precarious and fragile Frente Popular—the multi-party left-wing coalition that won the February 1936 general election during Spain’s Second Republic—was simultaneously and violently antag-onized by some of its constituent parties and by the fascist rebels from the opposite side of the political spectrum. The controversial thesis that two or more coups d’état happened in hazardous synchronicity—as a Lefortian “spectacle of diversity” that created the conditions for a transformative “event” which finally

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brought the plurality of revolution to an end—was circulated in 1976 by influential novelist Juan Benet in his very short essay Qué fue la guerra civil (11-16). See also Furet (44–48) on the transitory convergence of heterogeneous interests in strategic alliances which retroactively can be made to resemble monolithic formations. This is in fact a central theme in Ferrín’s Bretaña, which uses the prospect of a fight to the death between the two existing ranks of prison guards in Terra Ancha as the contingent occasion for the launching of an interclass revolution from within the carceral institutions where Tagen Ata’s radical activ-ists are jailed side by side with the common offenders whom they secretly indoctrinate.

4. See Hallward’s “Interview” with Badiou (123–25) for a well-known instance of this formulation, which reproduces Badiou’s words here given in English and in quotation marks.

5. See Rancière’s “Comunistas sen comunismo?” (178), recently published in Méndez Ferrín’s A Trabe de Ouro, for an updated view of “communism”—loosely identified with Rancière’s influential view of “democracy”—as the subject’s future emancipation from his or her minoritized status. This emancipation is predicated paradoxically on the asymmetrical equality of individual intelligences with a collective intel-ligence that remains in constant flux; on the heterogeneous and undecided condition of all experiential forms which give shape to the tensions between domination and emancipation; and on the renunciation of a fixed and monolithic idea of the future in favor of an infinitude of possible futures whose main linea-ments are inaccessible to the subject of equal rights who inhabits the present.

6. As Bakhtin writes about Crime and Punishment, outside a dialogue of “conflicting truths” taking place throughout the entire plot of the novel, “not a single essential act is realized” (Problems 75).

7. Despite the two men’s many disagreements, Piñeiro’s Editorial Galaxia published Ferrín’s novel, Arrabaldo do norte, in 1964.

8. See Bakhtin, Problems 18, 91–97. Specifically, the treatment of each voice and its world as a dynamic separate totality (a “whole”) does not erase that voice’s inner divisions and fluctuations, which in fact resisting its fragmentary re-elaboration into a function of a greater totality. Ferrín’s novels do not end with the full realization of a transformative event that may amount to a resolution. Rather, his stories come to a halt after the last narrated action in each novel’s plot is presented: Rotbaf riding into a mythic forest in Retorno; a massive uprising in Terra Ancha’s and Tagen Ata’s prison systems in Bretaña. These concluding episodes might perhaps affect the recomposition of social relations, but such possibility is not confirmed in the narrative.

9. The Irmandades de Tagen Ata are an illegal group based on the Partido Galeguista do interior mentioned above and its expatriate counterpart in Argentina, the pro-guerrilla Irmandade Galega.

10. Piñeiro’s well-known statement, “Pra unha filosofía da saudade” (1953), consciously downplays the emphasis laid on objective environmental conditions by scientific Marxism and other materialist philoso-phies. His interpretation of Galician identity revolves, rather, around the twofold operation of “vitalización do Esprito”—his indirect way of calling for a subjective temporalizing of literature—and “espritoalización da Vida”—his call for a de-temporalizing of history. In this way the project of identifying the “sentimental singularity” [singularidade sentimental] of Galicians takes center stage (36). Beyond this sentimental self-differentiation, there would be no room for an authentic Galician identity. The sentiment of “saudade” or chronic longing for the affective completion of a lost totality of being overcomes the opposition between “instinctive life” [vida instintiva], informed by absolute temporality, and “pure rationality” [pura racionali-dade], informed by absolute intemporality (36–37). Since this overcoming involves the crossing into a higher ontological dimension—so Piñeiro claims—it can be construed as the source of Galicians’ “radical, ontological freedom” [libertade radical, ontolóxica] (38). By contrast, Piñeiro’s “objective reality” [realidade ouxetiva] echoes, as well as denies, the objective conditions of revolutionary action; objective reality pre-dictably becomes for him a space of bondage because in it there is no sentimental “intimacy” understood in the sense of “inwardness” or “introspection”. He tellingly uses the phrases “essential liberty of intimacy/ introspection” [libertade esencial da intimidade] and “radical inwardness of the being of man” [intimidade radical do ser do home] (37–38). This conclusion amounts to a thorough renunciation of direct political action. Piñeiro’s use of the transparency/ opacity opposition, combined with the rationality/ vitality bino-mial, may echo Ortega y Gasset’s aesthetic ideas of the 1910s and earlier 1920s.

11. For other examples of this rhetoric, see Retorno 59–60. The obvious subtext of Ulm Roan’s tirade is Piñeiro’s bizarre mixture of philosophical clichés in “Pra unha filosofía da saudade,” which also borrows freely from Ortega y Gasset’s and Heidegger’s more rigorous theorizations in addition to Otero Pedrayo’s baroque prose style.

12. This sentence is indebted to Balibar (96–100).13. The episode of Rotbaf confronting Ulm Roan may be based on a series of conversations between

Ferrín and Piñeiro (Salgado and Casado 69–77).

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14. See Le Goff (168–78) for a discussion of Chrétien de Troyes’s “Brocéliande” as a transitional space of exchange in which courtliness, culture, and savagery are managed symbolically to create a scene of adventure and initiatory exploits.

15. The last chapter of Arrabaldo contains a long passage (128–30) which reads like a parody of Ramón Otero Pedrayo’s bucolic writing on rural landscape, itself the embodiment of Galicia’s literary ethnonationalism in the early twentieth century.

16. See Albérès 10–13. Following Albert Camus’s preference for rebellion over revolution, Albérès calls the authors who focus on both existential alienation and self-interrogation “écrivains de la révolte” (254).

17. A partial list of the outstanding discrepancies between Tagen Ata and Galicia in 1970 would include these three. First, while Terra Ancha has recognized Tagen Ata’s limited autonomous status, Franco’s regime is still focused on enforced centralization and homogeneity across the board. Second, while Rotbaf embodies a romantically radical Galicia Exterior, at that time the expatriate community in the Americas and in northern Europe had begun to shift to centrist and possibilist positions not unlike those upheld by Ulm Roan. And third, while azerrata peasants do not own the land they till, their Galician counterparts are in significant numbers minifundium owners who (in rapidly increasing num-bers) work part-time in nearby towns at the same time as they attend to their non-specialty small plots of land. One of Ferrín’s frequent critiques of progressive Galician intellectuals from earlier generations (Castelao is his main example) is that they advanced the notion of a rural nation composed largely of small-scale land proprietors (a nation of yeomen or paisanos) when in reality much of Galicia’s peasantry has historically been a class of destitute subalterns—caseiros—who tilled someone else’s land.

18. In the early Transition this common anti-statist stance informed the activities of armed-guerrilla groups and various kinds of libertarian platforms, as well as capitalist lobbies pushing for the end of the Francoist state’s monopolies and the deregulation of market exchanges (Díaz 151–63, esp. 153–57).

19. A legal conundrum is created when a maligned sub-state nation rises against a rival nationalistic platform which it had previously supported in the successful realignment of the existing legal order iden-tified with the state (Schmitt 83–84). The dominant force in the earlier uprising may have legalized its hegemonic position by means of a referendum whereby the legitimacy of right becomes identical with the legality of the republic. Nonetheless, the contingency of the victors’ accession to the government of the state exposes the origin of sovereignty as the decisionistic manipulation of the exception.

20. See Aranguren (22–24, 28–33) for a stimulating take on this issue.21. See González Gómez (411–13), whose words I adapt in English translation and between quota-

tion marks. This critic’s misunderstanding of fantasy’s role in the philo-Breton novels comprising la matière de Tagen Ata arises from a conflation of Ferrín’s project with those of Cunqueiro and Torrente. The Galician critics of the early Transition who, following Piñeiro’s lead (he reviewed Retorno in Galaxia’s journal, Grial, in 1971), denied Ferrín’s politically driven work the literary merit accorded to his earlier work include César Antonio Molina, Pilar Vázquez Cuesta, and Carlos Casares. See extracts of opinions in González-Millán 99–101, 165–67. Besides Piñeiro’s, other adverse and cynical reviews by Anxo Tarrío and Casares are collected in Ramón Nicolás’s dossier of opinions appended by way of an epilogue to the edi-tion cited in this essay. Favorable commentators featured in the same dossier include Xosé Manuel Beiras, Dolores Vilavedra, Manuel Forcadela, and Anxo Angueira.

22. This paragraph is indebted to Angueira (447–54).23. Jo Labanyi, David Herzberger, Ángel Loureiro, and Xoán González-Millán are among the literary

critics who have devoted important studies to the ongoing tensions in late-Francoist and early-Transition culture between the writing of histories (whether it is from right-wing, center-right or left-of-center posi-tions) and the counter-historical fictions that variously flaunt their fictionality while exposing the mystify-ing rhetorical strategies at work in any type of historiographic project.

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Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín and the Novel of Revolution

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