Cela's «San Camilo, 1936» as Anti-History
John H. R. Polt
Universidad de California, Berkeley
In the prologue to his autobiographical
La rosa, Camilo José Cela declared in
1950 that his future memoirs «no han de llegar
más acá del día de San Camilo de 1936... Sobre la guerra
civil escribiré mi novela, si Dios me da vida, dentro de quince o veinte
años»
1. Cela made good his word with the publication
in 1969 of
Vísperas, festividad y octava de San Camilo
del año 1936 en Madrid, a work that has sharply divided critics.
Some, including Fernando Uriarte and Gemma Roberts, praise the novel's
rejection of history and «ideocracia» in favor of an
intrahistoria that reflects individual
experience2. Others, like Madeleine de Gogorza
Fletcher and, more virulently, Paul Ilie, have condemned Cela for sacrificing
global perspective and refusing to clarify badly needed «lessons of
history»3.
Such widely divergent views suggest that it may be useful to look in some
detail at how Cela deals with history, why he deals with it as he does, and how
San Camilo is related to some of its author's
other works.
The subject of San Camilo seems to be an historical event, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; yet we shall do better to think of it as dealing with the personal experience of that event as distinguished from the event itself. The two are not the same thing. Our knowledge of our experiences is immediate and unique, regardless of the accuracy with which our impressions may reflect objective realities. Experience is, in other words, life itself as each of us lives it for himself. The concept of an historical event, on the other hand, is an ordering and classification of countless individual actions and experiences, most, if not all, of which are inevitably not experienced directly by the orderer and classifier. It is not life, but an abstraction from life.
This distinction is related to the essence of narration. A novelist
is faced by infinite possibilities in terms of characters, action, and
descriptive details; yet even the most prolix descriptive artist necessarily
rejects most of these possibilities and selects others, imposing on them an
order he may consider necessary but that is, clearly, of his invention. This
selection and ordering of narrative materials seems always to have concerned
Cela, whose experimentation with narrative technique can be interpreted as an
attempt to see how closely fiction, within the constraints of its unavoidable
artificiality, can approach the form and immediacy of life. In a preliminary
note to
La colmena, Cela describes that novel as
«un trozo de vida narrado paso a paso, sin reticencias, sin
extrañas tragedias, sin caridad, como la vida discurre, exactamente como
la vida discurre»
4. His narration, he is
telling us, develops in an open-ended time with a minimum of authorial
structuring. The inescapable paradox is, of course, that only careful
structuring can give the impression of formlessness; and Cela recognizes this
when he declares, only a few lives farther on, that the book's
«arquitectura es compleja, a mí me costó mucho trabajo
hacerla»
. Eleven years later, in the prefatory note to the fourth edition
of
La colmena, the author returns to this topic:
«y éste es un libro de historia, no una novela»
(p. 111). He
suggests that his narrative is, as far as possible, an uncontrived and
unordered rellection of (chaotic) life.
History and life, in these comments of Cela's,
mean much the same thing, because history is here used in the sense of the
history that one makes by living: «La historia es como la
circulación de la sangre o como la digestión de los
alimentos»
5.
History, in other words, is something like
Unamuno's
intrahistoria, the minute, biological
flow of many individual existences6.
History can also have an other meaning,
however: the history that one writes or reads. While making history requires
only the existente of living beings who go about their activities, writing
history requires an historian, who, like the author of a novel, must select and
order characters and events from among the countless ones existing at any
time7. He jusges their importante, exposes the causal connections
among them, and observes the operation of principles. He identifies a
government, a people, or a state as protagonist, making something like a
fictional character out of an abstraction; and even if he speaks of historical
individuals, he necessarily focuses, as does a novelist with his creations, on
only some of their actions and experiences. In his attempt to make sense of the
apparent chaos of experience, the historian must abstract from immediate life,
destroy the vividness of experience, and, in a sense, dehumanize events, which
are no longer envisaged in and for them selves, but as part of a larger
pattern.
Historians, as is their business, have sought to makes sense of the
events of the 18th. of July, and so have such novelists as Foxá, Aub,
Sender, García Serrano, and Gironella. In
San Camilo, however, Cela gives us not a
bird's-eye view of those events but rather a worm's-eye view. His novel tries
to convey the unstructured and un mediated
experience of those July days, not the
historical event as abstracted from experience by historians8. Structure is unavoidable, but its aim here is to
render less the meaning than the feeling of the event. Perhaps because our
minds necessarily seek meaning, the paradoxical outcome of this process is to
suggest that the feeling is the meaning, of at least the most important
meaning, because, being non abstract, it is the only one we can know directly.
This conclusion is an extension of what Ilie has identified with respect to the
temporal structure of
La colmena, Cela's «voluntad de
mantenerse en el único aspecto de un cosmos cambiante del que se posee
plena aprehensión: el momento mismo.
Sólo el ahora es conocedero,
tangible; la conciencia humana trata más efectivamente con el
presente, porque cualquier momento pasado es una idealización, una
entidad inconcreta dependiente de un incierto recuerdo»
9. Significantly,
San Camilo is written mainly in the present
tense10.
The author's problem in San Camilo is how to render the immediacy of experience. The mirror before which the narrator so often finds himself is emblematic of this problem and of the relationship between experience and objective reality11. The mirror is reflection, in various senses: in that of meditation, as the narrator takes stock of his life and his feelings, in that of the reproduction of reality through our experience or impressions of it, and in that of narration, the mirror, as Stendhal would have it, held to life's road. In all of these senses, the mirror is problematical, as is suggested by the opening lines of the novel:
Uno se ve en el espejo y se tutea incluso con confianza, el espejo no tiene marco, ni comienza ni acaba, o sí, sí tiene un marco primoroso dorado con paciencia y panes de oro pero la luna no es de buena calidad y la imagen que devuelve enseña las facciones amargas y desencajadas, pálidas y como de haber dormido mal, a lo mejor lo que sucede es que devuelve la atónita faz de un muerto todavía enmascarada con la careta del miedo a la muerte, es probable que tú estés muerto y no lo sepas; los muertos también ignoran que lo están, ignoran absolutamente todo12. |
A proper frame would separate the world within the mirror from the
world without, the world of subjective experience from that of objective
reality, the world of the narration from the limitless possibilities beyond
that world. In
San Camilo, however, both frame and mirror are
problematical. The frame may not exist («el espejo no tiene
marco»
), and the narrator may therefore be unable to distinguish between
one world and another; or, conversely, the frame may be all too apparent,
carefully elaborated by the craftsman whose job it is to make this separation
(the narrator or historian), while the glass may be incapable of accurately
reflecting reality. Near the end of
San Camilo, the narrator questions not only the
reliability but even the authenticity of his reflection -i.e., experience-, as
he tells himself that he never had a mirror and has always had to use someone
else's (pp. 321-22). Perhaps, the narrator seems to suggest, even what he has
taken to be his experience has been manufactured for him by others.
The mirror also serves to double the narrator into the implied
speaking yo and the spoken-to
tú. In the mirror the narrator
sees «ese otro que es él y no es él
al mismo tiempo»
(Roberts, p. 75), an image that has the
same features as he, but arranged in diametrically opposite order. This play of
images is particularly appropriate to a subject related to the Civil War:
tú is
yo, just as, on a national scale,
they are
we, people of the same race and language. This
interplay and ultimate identity of the self and the other is made clear on page
118:
The carnival is not here simply «pretense and play»
(Ilie, p. 39), but an orgiastic ritual that the author presents as a threat, as
he does other rituals. Cela suggests that shedding another man's blood is
equivalent to shedding one's own when
yo and
tú,
we and
they, are ultimately the same. Far from being
an «irresponsible» metaphor (Ibid.), this
passage captures the terrible poignancy of civil war, when men kill those like
most them, indeed, in a sense, themselves.
The narrator (yo and tú) may be one thing but could as well be another. This indecisiveness and ambiguity, which is at the same time an inclusiveness, in seen in the narrator's musings about the assault on the Montaña barracks:
(p. 235) |
The repetitive style, of which Cela is so fond, here suggests the mirror-like similarity of the opposing sides, as they are reflected, at least potentially, in the protean narrator.
Such imprecision leads Ilie to declare that «since narrative
perceptions impose themselves on the reader as reliable data, some assurance
would be desirable that the mind which narrates them so audaciously is not
obsessed or excessively neurotic»
(p. 49). In a more neatly packaged
novel, a pseudo-historian could order and interpret events for us; but Cela's
narrator is both obsessed (by his own sexuality) and neurotic (because of the
siren calls of heroism and his fear of and incapacity for action). The only
thing reliable about his perceptions is that he perceives them; through the
symbolism of the mirror, the novel repeatedly suggests that the observer and
the medium of his observation are hopelessly distorted and distorting. The
narrator exists not to give «reliable data» but to convey his
fallible and distorting perceptions, which for him, as is the case for each of
us, are the only immediately accessible knowledge.
The narration that issues from Cela's narrator is a typographically undifferentiated mixture of heterogeneous materials, characterized by long sentences whose loose colloquial structure allows repeated and abrupt shifts of topic. Developments that are important from the historian's point of view remain imbedded in their caleidoscopic context. Thus Don Roque Barcia learns of the kidnaping of Calvo Sotelo from a café waiter, yet nothing distinguishes this intelligence from the apparently irrelevant information that surrounds it (Don Roque's taste in cigarettes, the summer vacations of Joaquín and Serafín Álvarez Quintero) (p. 8). The news of the military uprising in Morocco is first heard, or rather, not heard, on the radio:
(p. 140, ellipses in the text) |
As no one listens to the radio, its message falls into a void, though then rumor takes over and communicates the news (pp. 141-48). An historical event thus has no reality here except as experience; what counts is not what has happened in Morocco, but what each character hears or falls to hear, believes or falls to believe about it.
Similarly, the murder of Lt. Castillo is presented not with the hindsight of the historian but as experienced by its contemporaries. A witness mixes his story of the shooting with details of how he lost his glasses13. According to one account, Castillo was killed near the Calle de Fuencarral; according to another, on Fuencarral (pp. 70, 71). Different theories about who did it surface in the discord of unidentified voices:
(p. 85) |
The first explanation offered here is the generally accepted
one14; from there on
the hypotheses become increasingly absurd. The same process occurs with the
murder of Calvo Sotelo: «A Calvo Sotelo lo mataron
los guardias de asalto para vengar la muerte del
teniente»
, which is historical truth; but then come other,
more or less improbable, conjectures (pp. 85-86). Cela is not hiding
established facts, but showing how the individual who lives immersed in events,
experiencing them directly without the benefit (and distortion) of the ordering
bird's-eye view of the historian, gets his news in specific ways and often as a
jumble of conflicting reports.
As if to reinforce this subjectivization of objective events, Cela
also presents the same process in reverse, so that absurd notions and purely
subjective fancies are cloaked in the language of scientific pronouncements:
«Nadie lo sabe pero el primer rey que hubo en el
mundo nació de un monstruoso huevo de golondrina»
(p. 203); «Si a una mujer la preña su hermano el hijo sale tonto pero si la
preña su padre, no»
(p. 224); «El carácter de las
mujeres puede conocerse estudiándoles la forma del
ombligo»
(p. 301). This pseudoscientific discourse is to
be found in several of Cela's novels and reaches its culmination in
Oficio de tinieblas 5; in
San Camilo it is a further indication of the
unreliability of the narrator and of the precariousness of all knowledge.
«No perdamos la perspectiva, yo ya
estoy harta de decirlo, es lo único importante»
,
says Doña Rosa at the beginning of
La colmena; but in
San Camilo, «lo
que pasa es que estamos demasiado cerca y carecemos de
perspectiva»
(p. 166). An unidentified voice, presumably
the narrator's, explains that «la historia vista
desde cerca confunde a todos, a los actores y a los espectadores, y es siempre
muy minúscula y estremecedora, también muy difícil de
interpretar»
(p. 78).
San Camilo has, of course, a structure; but it
is one that imitates the unstructured chaos of life (pace
the believers in a teleology, be it deistic or historical-materialist).
Why this rejection of history? Because it is not life but only one
more narrative genre. After a random account of more or less important news
followed by the text of some brief advertisements, Cela's narrator declares
that «el periódico no da para más,
la verdad es que por quince céntimos tampoco se pueden pedir los Episodios Nacionales»
(p. 22). The reference to Galdós's novels, rather than to the works of
established historians, suggests the essential similarity be tween history and
fiction. It also reminds us that the
Episodios, with their introduction of fictional
participant-observers into historical contexts, try, in effect, to give the
reader the experience of historical events, though perhaps with less attention
to the problematic nature of such an attempt than we find in
San Camilo. The newspaper is yet another
narrative, history shot on the wing, so to speak; but the difference between it
and Galdós's books is less one of kind than one of price and, one
supposes, of aesthetic quality. Both are abstractions from reality made with
words; and words lend themselves to manipulation by leaders and to the spawning
of violence: «es fácil fabricar asesinos
basta con vaciarles la cabeza de recuerdos y llenársela de aire
ilusionado, de aire histórico»
(p. 76). To
understand this assertion in the context of Cela's novelistic
corpus, we must recall the preliminary note to
the third edition of
La colmena (1957):
(p. 108, emphasis added) |
One may disagree with this unflattering view that places man on the
level of the ant and the hyena, but its reasonable consequence is that ideas
and ideologies should seem unnatural. In
San Camilo, recuerdos suggests individual
memory of individual experiences, the real past of the real man.
Aire ilusionado, on the other hand, is
synonymous with
aire histórico, that is, with the past
structured and there fore deformed by the historian15. It is
ilusionado because it tempts one to
ignore the immediate world of his experiences and to sacrifice himself (and
others) for messianic goals. The fascination (ilusión) of history is the point, not its accutacy.
Aire suggests insubstantiality, a past
made of words rather than experience; and words are rejected: «Escupe de
tu boca las palabras, lávate de palabras, que todas quieren decir lo
mismo, sangre y estupidez, insomnio, odio y hastío...»
(p. 83).
This distinction between the theoretical knowledge of science and the concrete
knowledge of experience is crucial in
San Camilo.
What Cela's narrator is saying, then, is that men become violent
when they concern themselves with ideological abstractions rather than with
their flesh-and-blood existente, and that crimes are com mitted in the narre of
history, in obedience to what ideologues consider the dictates or
«lessons» of history. Symbols, myths, and rituals, the spawn of a
history abstracted from experience, are dangerous: «El mundo no se arregla porque a la gente le gusta desfilar con su
insignia o con su banderita en la solapa... lo único que cambian son las
insignias y las banderitas»
(p. 130)16. In the mind of Engracia, who dies in the
assault on the Montaña barracks, slogans and ritual words have crowded
out fiancé, work, and family; and similar slogans come from the other
side (p. 230). The point is made most clearly in the description of the
parallel funerals of Castillo and Calvo Sotelo. The casket of the former is
draped in a red flag and greeted with clenched fists as an orator proclaims:
«Juro ante la historia y por mi honor que este
crimen no quedará sin venganza»
(p. 120). Calvo
Sotelo's casket is greeted with the Roman salute and the proclamation:
«Juro ante Dios y por España que este
crimen no quedará sin venganza»
(p. 125).
History and honor, God and Spain, are placed on the same level, that
of ritual words leading to violente; and later referentes to the notions of
limpieza de sangre and knightly
heroism (pp. 294, 297) suggest that the deadly fascination with words and
concepts is itself historie in Spain. Cela's narrator feels the attraction of
messianism and, occasionally, the wish to partake of its intoxication; but he
also knows that the appearance of heroism may mask the biological reality of
mutilation or death: «A un héroe de
cualquier guerra si le dan un tiro en el espinazo lo dejan paralítico
para siempre pero se defiende vendiendo tabaco»
(p. 195).
The modest cheerfulness («se
defiende»
) of the final clause is clearly ironic.
Fear of the messianic lure of history leads the narrator's
Tío Jerónimo to advise him: «A tus
veinte años basta con defender el corazón del hielo,
esfuérzate por creer en algo que no sea la historia, esa gran falacia,
cree en las virtudes teologales y en el amor, en la vida y en la muerte, ya ves
que no te pido demasiado...»
(p. 329). Although one might
object that the theological virtues are also abstractions, the rejection of
history here means an affirmation of biological life as more valuable than
abstractions and historical mission. It also questions the possibility of
reading «lessons» in history, since «la sangre no es tinta indeleble sino manchadiza, las
páginas que se escriben con sangre pronto son de muy difícil
lectura, en cuanto caen las primeras lluvias se hacen de muy difícil
lectura...»
(p. 298).
For Cela, any meaning of the Civil War and, indeed, of history must be sought at the level of individual experience. Hence a long and crucial passage from which I shall quote only the central part:
(pp. 77-78) |
To complain, as does Ilie, that this passage fails to note the
«quality and moral implications»
of different deaths, to clarify
their «physiological, social, or economic causes»
, and thus reduces
violence to «banal monotony»
(p. 36), is to miss the point: Cela's
characters share a space, a time, a common humanity, and a fate, death; and his
ironic commentary on the murder of the prostitute rejects the categorization of
deaths by their «quality and moral implications»
. Every death is
significant, not from the point of view of the historian, compelled to
abstract, but from that of the real individual human beings who kill and are
killed. The deliberately monotonous recital of violence reflects the experience
of that terrible state of things in which this truth is forgotten and the death
of individuals is dehumanized and trivialized.
For Cela, then, the physical or physiological is paramount over the
abstract or ideological; and
San Camilo's principal
«explanation» of the Civil War, the explosion of sexual repression
into ideologically motivated fratricidal violence17, is the most
striking example of this primacy. The connection between violence and sex
pervades the entire narration. The urge to kill is a physiological phenomenon,
an itch in the mouth (pp. 56, 92, 103
et passim). Murder provides «unos instantes deleitosos»
(p. 47), and the
thought of it is related to an erection (p. 56). Sexually tinged and often
grotesque violence abounds (e.g., pp. 66, 257), as it does in the author's
other novels18. In this one, the
sexual explanation of historical events is made psychologically verisimilar by
being presented within the context of the sexual obsessions of a twenty-year
old and the peculiar sexual morality of his uncle. It is thus a functioning
part of the world of this novel, though we need not accept it as an
interpretation of the world in which we our selves live, any more than we need
accept Dostoyevsky's Slavophile and Orthodox messianism when granting it its
role in his fiction.
The biological explanation of the War fits with Cela's consistent
stress, over the years, on the physiological basis of being, the primacy 19cal.
We have already noted the autor's declaration that the parameters of humnan
culture are physiological: «comer, reproducirse y
destruirse»
. For Cela, man has no cosmic significance;
hence the conclusion of
Pabellón de reposo, after its accounts
of individual sufferings: «El mundo, impasible a
la congoja, sigue dando vueltas por el espacio obediente a las complicadas
leyes de la mecánica celeste»
. Man has no valid
role as hero, martyr, or messiah. He is, in colloquial terms,
un piernas, that is, «hombre insignificante, sin posición social ni
económica»
20. Just as Martín Marco says of himself,
«y yo hecho un piernas»
(La colmena, p. 280), so the narrator of
San Camilo tells his reflection in the
mirror:
(p. 13) |
Through many repetitions and variations of this theme, the narrator
depicts himself as the plaything of forces beyond his control. He is one of
many, everyman, not outstanding either as hero or as victim. Nonetheless, each
individual, in the ultimate reality of his body, is unique; as Tío
Jerónimo says, «el mundo está lleno
de desconocidos pero son todos diferentes, te aseguro que son todos diferentes,
cada uno tiene su dolor y su gozo, a veces minúsculo, y cuando nace o se
muere no pasa nada, eso es cierto, pero nace o se muere una esperanza y una
decepción...»
(p. 332).
Contempt and pity are mixed in this view of man, along with a grudging love, not for the abstractions of class or race or the abstraction «mankind», but for the individual man21. San Camilo is designed to show the experiences and feelings of such men as they are caught in events not of their making. We may not share Cela's view of man, but the relevant question for literary criticism is not the accuracy of his view or whether Cela should have written a different kind of novel, but whether Cela's view is coherent with the structure and style of his work. In the case of San Camilo it is: structure and style of the novel resist hierarchical ordering and blend apparently unmediated human experiences on the same plane, suggesting that human reality consists ultimately of individual experience, not of abstractions from events. Cela's novel rejects history because history, by hiding this truth, leads men to sacrifice the physical, including life it self, to the abstract.
Finally, does Cela's rejection of history and ideology in San Camilo itself constitute an ideological position? As the product of beliefs that have informed the whole varied course of the author's productions, clearly it does. Unlike the ideological systems that underlie modern totalitarianisms, however, it is also a defense of the individual, pitifully limited as he is, against those who would turn him into grist for their ideological mills.