More memories of Soria...

As I sit at home on a miserably cold and wet Queens' Birthday weekend I am reminded of a similarly wintry day six months ago spent wandering along the banks of the River Duero near the Castillian town of Soria. Since blogging here has been fairly sporadic of late, I thought I would put up a few more photos from my visit to the spiritual home of the poet Antonio Machado...

Antonio Machado and the uses of Spanish history

As I've noted on other occasions (see for instance here and here) the poetry of the Spanish writer and "martyr" for the Republican cause Antonio Machado is both endlessly fascinating and, at the same time, deeply problematic in the way it manages to combine progressive leftist political sentiments with a Romantic attachment to symbols of Spain's imperialist past and ideas of Castillian supremacy. Yet, at the same time there is a powerful argument that poetry is not an exercise in instrumental reason and as such should be judged solely according to political criteria (a fact that I think also makes it hard to dismiss anti-rationalist philosophers such as Unamuno and Zambrano so hard to dismiss).

Looking down the River Dureo towards the Hermitage of San Saturio

I was reminded of this paradox during my visit last month to Soria, high up at the eastern end of the Castillian meseta near the headwaters of the River Duero, where Machado wrote his most famous collection of poems - Campos de Castilla - and where he met, married and then buried his young wife Leonor. While the strident literary nationalism that inhabits much of this collection is disconcerting, when actually physically confronted with the landscape which Machado describes in these poems it is difficult not to feel moved in a similarly irrational, 'Romantic' way... Somehow this desolate, rocky terrain - with its accumulated millenia of ruined cities, fortresses and monasteries - speaks to you in a way that the empty vistas of 'Godzone' can never even hope to aspire to...

The ruins of the 12th century monastery of San Juan del Duero

While the town of Soria itself is perhaps today a little too eager to cash-in on the legacy of its most famous resident (as evidenced by the 'Cervecería Machado' I encountered in the Calle de los Estudios which sold only Belgian beer...) and has lost some of its poetic 'lustre', a short walk across to the other side of the river you find yourself amidst the familiar vistas so beloved by the poet:

He vuelto a ver los álamos dorados,
álamos del camino en la ribera
del Duero, entre San Polo y San Saturio,
tras las murallas viejas de Soria - barbacana
hacia Aragón, en castellana tierra-.

Estos chopos del río, que acompañan
con el sonido de sus hojas secas
el son del agua, cuando el viento sopla,
tienen en sus cortezas
grabadas iniciales que son nombres
de enamorados, cifras que son fechas.
¡Alamos del amor que ayer tuvisteis
de ruiseñores vuestras ramas llenas;
álamos que seréis mañana liras
del viento perfumado en primavera;
álamos del amor cerca del agua
que corre y pasa y sueña;
alamos de las márgenes del Duero,
conmigo vais, mi corazón os lleva!

('Campos de Soria' VIII)

Along the banks of the river it is also possible to see the remains of the monastery of San Polo, which belonged to the Templar military order until their forcible dissolution in the 14th century, and about which the patron saint of Spanish Romanticism Gustavo Bécquer dedicated his gothic tales 'El Monte de los Ánimas' and 'El Rayo de Luna'.

The gatehouse of the monastery of San Polo, which sits astride the old road between San Juan del Duero and the Hermitage of San Saturio

In the midst of all this history, it is hard to begrudge Machado's appropriation of Castile's store of cultural and historical capital in the pursuit of his modernista literary project, even though the nationalist overtones make his poetry difficult to defend from an objective, political point of view. Perhaps the real problem for Machado (and his fellow Republican intellectuals) was not so much their tendency to appeal to nationalist sentimentality and a rose-tinted view of Spain's military past, but rather the fact that Franco's Nationalists were simply more credible representatives of this historical tradition. What was needed therefore was not so much a simple appeal to history but rather, as Juan Goytisolo advocates in his novel Juan sin tierra, a systematic re-writing or re-imagining of the national past, which promotes dissident figures such as Enrique IV (the reputedly - at least according to according to Gregorio Marañon - homosexual and morisco-phile half brother of Isabel 'la Católica') at the expense of the dominant "Golden Age" narrative handed down to us by authors such as Menéndez Pidal.

In this sense then, it might be said that the problem is not so much a surfeit of irrationality or Romanticism on the part of Machado, but rather that in his pursuit of these strategies he simply does not go far enough...

Postscript:

I couldn't conclude this brief soliloquy on Spanish left nationalism without mentioning the website of the Castilian federation of the Stalinist Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España, which amusingly fights for the self-determination of Castile (along with all the other "oppressed nations" of Spain) and 'liberation' from the rule of EU and US imperialism (since they view Spain as essentially an exploited neo-colony of these latter). Somewhat scarily, in large parts of provincial Spain (such as La Rioja, where I spent the majority of time during my recent trip to the Iberian peninsular) these guys seem to be just about the only organised far left force!

Jean Genet: the writer as a perpetual exile

The second volume of Juan Goytisolo's autobiography, Realms of Strife (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990 - trans. Peter Bush) contains a very moving tribute to the French poet, novelist and playwright Jean Genet (1910-1986) - whose life in many ways parallels that of the Spanish writer.

Genet was the orphaned son of a prostitute who grew up to become a vagrant, military deserter and petty thief and was only saved from a life sentence of imprisonment in 1948 (after over 10 convictions) by the intervention of André Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre (among others) who recognised the extent of his creative talents.

His works reveal a powerful fascination and empathy with people existing at the margins of society such as criminals, homosexuals and immigrants.

Goytisolo was introduced to Genet soon after his arrival in Paris in 1956 by Monique Lange of the publishing house Gallimard, and from there began a relationship that was to have a powerful influence over Goytisolo's own subsequent political and literary evolution.

Like Goytisolo, Genet was a homosexual who was initially attracted to the Arab countries of the Maghreb because of the relatively more uninhibited notions of masculinity in North African society (despite the dominance of Islam).

From this initial point of attraction Genet became more deeply involved both personally and politically in the Arab world - defending Algerian migrant workers against police brutality in France and traveling to meet with Palestinian freedom fighters in Lebanon.

He was then an exile in every sense of the word.

In his memoirs Goytisolo recounts the time he lent Genet a copy of the poems of Antonio Machado, a writer with whom Genet was not then acquainted but who had the status of a kind of secular saint among the Spanish Republican exiles abroad:

He returned the books to me after a few days and rattled off a string of criticisms: he thought the writer's human and literary horizons narrow and limited; his obsession with Castile was a way of narcisistically contemplating his own navel and resurrecting the retrograde values of the countryside. Machado not only wrote in Spanish - as Genet wrote in French - but wanted to be Spanish, a cultural identification that Genet could not understand and labeled as chauvinist. He was left totally indifferent by the moral landscape of France: neither the gardens of Versailles nor the cathedral of Rheims stirred any emotions in him. So why, then, that love of Soria, Castile, the trees on the riverbank, the slow procession of poplars? The fatherland, he would say much later, could only be an ideal for those who didn’t have one, like the Palestinian fedayeen.

Goytisolo concludes his tribute with the following account of his friend's death some 30-odd years later:

He met his end on one of those short trips to the France he so hated, when he wished to correct the proofs of his last book, Un Captif amoureux. His wish to be buried in Morocco, to leave no trace of himself in his country apart from his beautiful, repellent, and poisoned prose, apparently complicated the formalities of the funeral. As with Abdallah twenty years before, his body remained several days in the morgue; and as Abdallah blackened by poison had returned to his African origins, Genet would in turn be reintegrated symbolically in his adoptive land: as I later learned from his Palestinian friends, the customs official asked those accompanying the coffin whether it was the body of a Moroccan worker. They proudly proclaimed it was.

Finally, Goytisolo notes that

Genet taught me to cast off my early vanity, political opportunism, my desire to cut a figure in the life of literary society…Without him, without his example, I would perhaps not have had the strength to break from the hierarchy of values accepted on the right and the left by my compatriots, to accept proudly my predictable rejection and isolation, to write all I have written from the time of Conde Julián.

The Other Count Julian

Tariq the conqueror of al-Andalus laying his conquests at the feet of the Umayyad viceroy

It is funny how sometimes a line or fragment of a poem can lead you off on the most circuitous yet interesting of intellectual tangents.

I had this experience a couple of years ago when I was reading the through some of the Civil War poetry of Antonio Machado - the Spanish modernist writer and contemporary of Unamuno and Azorín - and came across a sonnet entitled "A Otro Conde Don Julian" ("to the other Count Julian").

The poem itself, which is far inferior to Machado's earlier works such as those found in his collection Campos de Castilla (Lands of Castile) and of primarily propagandistic rather than literary significance, held little interest to me - but the title, which casts the nationalist leader General Franco in the role of the arch-betrayer of Spanish history Count Julian of Ceuta held a strange fascination.

My knowledge of the half legendary, half historical figure of Count Julian was derived from my early-adolescent reading of Walter Scott's "The Vision of Don Roderick" which with Scott's customary poetic licence recounts the story of the last Visigothic King of Spain and his defeat at the hands of the Moorish invaders (Sir Walter Scott, along with the Romances of King Arthur and Charlemagne, informed most of my 12-year-old world view).

In the poetic account of the fall of Visigothic Spain, King Roderic is betrayed by Count Julian, the governor of the Christian outpost of Ceuta which lies on the North African coastline at the closest point to the Spanish shore (the Romans knew it as the city of Septem). The reasons suggested for Julian's betrayal are many and varied - some say it was because Roderic raped one of Julian's daughters who was a hostage at the Visigothic Court in Toledo, others that Julian was the protector of the sons of the previous Visigothic King Wittiza, whom Roderic was suspected of assassinating.

More recently, historians have suggested that Julian may have been a Byzantine Greek official who had only entered into a temporary alliance with the Visigoths after the fall of Carthage to the Umayyads in 695-698 and the departure of the last Roman troops. Given the fact that the Umayyads proved to be considerably more tolerant towards other religions and denominations than the formerly Arian Visigothic rulers (who with the zeal of recent converts to the one true faith were continually trying to prove their Catholic bona fides to the Pope by violently persecuting Jews and heretics) it is not inconceivable that Julian's decision to enter into an alliance with Musa ibn-Nusair, the Umayyad governor of the newly conquered Maghreb provinces was motivated simply by enlightened self-interest.

Whichever of these scenarios is correct, what is uncontested is that in the year 711 Julian provided the fleet which transported the Berber Umayyad general Tariq ibn-Ziyad and his troops across the narrow straits to the landing place which now bears Tariq's name - the Rock of Gibraltrar (from the Arabic "Jabal Tariq"), echoing the invasion of Republican Spain by General Franco at the head of the Army of Morocco in August 1936, some 1200 years later.

After the defeat of Roderic at the Battle of Gaudalete and the establishment of Umayyad rule in Spain, Julian was rewarded for his "act of treachery" with extensive lands and titles.

These then were some of the literary and historical associations that Antonio Machado's piece of Civil War propaganda rekindled in my head, leading me to look up again the story of the Fall of Visigothic Spain and in the course of this process to discover the work of a remarkable man - also an exile estranged from the political and religious order of Christian Spain, a modern day Count Julian living in Morocco - the novelist Juan Goytisolo.

To be continued...