'Assent or destabilize': the articles of the anti-system Chirbes

A betrayal.

Rafael Chirbes, about to turn 28, did not hesitate.

In the constituent elections he would resignedly vote for one of the leftist parties, without knowing if it would be one or the other, but what would happen on June 15, 1977 he considered a betrayal: the legitimization of post-Franco power that implied "the resignation of some long persecuted aspirations” defended, in theory, by the workers and popular parties.

They didn't.

They wouldn't.

For him, who had been detained in the General Directorate of Security in 1968 and four months in jail in 1971 for his Maoist militancy, the leftist parties endorsed a political process that challenged his raison d'être.

“They are preparing to participate in the ceremony that denies everything to them in order to give it to the enemy.

Even more:

They agree to become censors of the historical machine of the people, erasing ideas, facts and aspirations that history has amply proven and they have defined”.

Critical culture was also participating in this drift.

An example?

The Semprún that had fascinated him with

now legitimized Planeta's relocation to the new power by accepting the star award for

.

The writer Rafael Chirbes, in 2014. Daniel Reinhardt (picture alliance / Getty Images)

Decades before Guillem Martínez outlined the category “Cultura de la Transición”, Chirbes, live, reviewing novels or movies or describing the publishing system, had already delimited its referents.

With echoes of cultural studies and under the impact of the economic crisis that ended with the end of history, since 2008 “CT Culture” has become one of the most fertile tools to substantiate a criticism of the State of 1978. Fiction Chirbes's imaginative was the best fit for this dissident understanding of recent history.

The narrators of his novels emerged as consciences that made it possible to interpret in depth the ethical and material roots of what was happening.

We discovered the intimacy where he amassed that lucidity after his death in his diaries.

Reading

, edited by Álvaro Díaz, we verified that its foundation was not only the radicality with which he understood himself.

This collection of articles, basically published in the

magazine between May 1975 and the end of 1978, reveals Chirbes' pugnacious intelligence as a reader to analyze the cultural process that took place during the Transition in parallel to the political process.

Describing Chirbes's critical intervention as countercultural can mislead the reader.

Although in one of the criticisms that she wrote at the time she affirmed that "in 1968 utopia was within reach", her aesthetic position was not subversive.

During the second half of the 1970s, he rather substantiated a critique of capitalist society and its aesthetic correlate at that time: the depoliticized culture of postmodernity, although he did not use that term yet.

He was an anti-establishment.

The authors that interested him were those who challenged that system of power and its language.

That is why he values ​​Juan Goytisolo so much that he learns the lesson of

.

And, in particular, he vindicates a tradition of committed realism that at that time the mandarins of the time considered outdated —beware of what he wrote on EL PAÍS— and the consensual ideology in vogue.

The essential thing in the novel was to show “the relations of power-money-commodity” and for this reason he did not tire of publicizing the work of the North American realists between the wars and placing Galdós at the center of the modern Spanish novel.

Because Galdós, like him, was the first to fight against treason with prose.

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