David K. Herzberger, de la Universidad de California,
Riverside, reseña
«Cartografías del 23-F.
Representaciones en la prensa, la televisión, la novela,
el cine y la cultura popular»,
de Francisca López y Enric
Castelló
en el Arizona Journal of
Hispanic Cultural Studies
(n.º 19, 2015)
Cartografías del 23-F.
Representaciones en la prensa, la televisión, la novela, el cine y la
cultura popular. Laertes (Barcelona),
2014. Edited by Francisca López and
Enric Castelló.
On
February 23, 1981, when Colonel Antonio Tejero and a band of armed men stormed
Spanish parliament and sought to instigate a rebellion against the
democratically elected government, the future of Spain stood near the precipice
of the past. Nearly three and a half
decades later, however, the question that comes to mind pertains not so much to
what actually happened during the two days of the takeover of Parliament (much
is known about the facts of the incident) but rather what did it mean to the
fledgling democracy still seeking to define its identity and affirm its
legitimacy. As Francisca López and Enric Castelló remind us in Cartografías del 23-F, the traditional
story of F-23 has generally been seen as a straightforward morality play: an
attempted coup; a king who demands loyalty to the government; surrender of the
rebels; a return to order. Spanish
democracy had been saved.
But
of course the story of F-23 is not really quite so simple, and the essays
collected in Cartografías point
clearly to its complexity. The impetus for the collection lies in the editors’
desire to move beyond the prevailing conceptualization and political use of
F-23 as “una especie de rito de pasaje nacional y mito de origen, para bien o
para mal, de la democracia actual” (23).
However, the event itself has not served as a constant and nagging
component of the nation’s collective memory of the fragility of democracy, as
perhaps might be expected. Both the
stories of F-23 and interest in those stories have changed over time: strong
initial coverage during the early 1980s, a general diminution in concern over
the next decade and a half, followed by the anticipated increase in interest in
2006 (the twenty-fifth anniversary) and a somewhat surprising resurgence in
2009. Cartografías examines the nature of the diverse representations
over this period of time that have appeared in a range of formats and
texts: documentaries, television
programs, movies, and narratives of various genres.
Cartografías is divided into two
sections. The first part, “Informativos y documentales,” explores works that
would generally be seen as pertaining to non-fiction genres. Four essays in this section efficiently cover
the facts as well as the controversies. Arantxa Capdevila’s essay, “La disolución de un consenso: el 23-F en la
prensa,” is particularly helpful as a diachronic summary of press coverage of
the events surrounding the attempted coup, and serves as well as an overview of
the many issues examined in other parts of the book: how the major actors in
the drama of F-23 have been portrayed over the years; how the events of those
days have acquired value and represented ideals at once embraced and rejected
by the nation; the process of constructing F-23 as both current event and
historical discourse.
The
remaining three essays in this section are equally useful, but with a different
focus in each case: Hugh O’Donnell
examines coverage of F-23 in the English-speaking press from around the world
(short-lived interest internationally, with the event itself quickly mythified
into the binary of the good (the King) and the bad (Tejero); José Carlos Rueda
Laffond explores television documentaries that use footage from Spanish
National Television during the takeover, which played a key role in the
creation of the democratic origin myth; Enric Castelló, in an excellent piece
on historical documentaries produced by television from the autonomous regions
of Spain, draws out many points of divergence between the local perspective on
F-23 (a much more nuanced view overall)
and the hegemonic discourse generally created and embraced by the national
media.
The
second section of the book (“Novelas, ficciones y cultura popular”) covers
various forms of fictional representation of F-23. Francisca López begins this
section with a comprehensive overview of narratives (“novela, casi novel o
crónica novelada” [145]) written about the events surrounding the coup from the
1980s through Javier Cercas’s hybrid Anatomía
de un instante, published in 2009. As López ably demonstrates, no single
truth can be found at the root of F-23 in these fictions, as both myth-making
and its deconstruction sustain various aspects of fictive narrations throughout
this thirty-year period.
The
remaining three essays of the collection explore television programs of various
types related to F-23. Ruth Gutiérrez Delgado and Sira Hernández Corchete
examine two popular mini-series shown on Spanish television, 23-F.
El día más difícil del Rey and Historia
de una transición, and explore how they relate to the already existing
perceptions of the events reported through television coverage and
documentaries in the past. The
divergence between fictive narratives produced immediately following F-23 and
those from the past five years forms the basis of a very fine essay by
Concepción Cascajosa Virino and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, who also underscore
how some of the most fully contestatory texts to the national myth-making of
F-23 appeared at unexpected moments of the Transition. Finally, Laia Quílez
Esteve’s piece on F-23 as portrayed in three contemporary
films (Muertos de risa, 1999; El calentito, 2005; 23-F: la película, 2011),
reflects on how film may be used ethically and aesthetically to shape the
popular understanding of history.
The
editors’ intention in putting together this collection clearly was not to bring
to light unknown facts pertinent to F-23, but rather to show how the events
associated with it have given rise to a large body of works produced from
multiple perspectives and with diverse and contradictory meanings. Certainly,
for many Spaniards F-23 stands less as a moment experienced than as an event
discovered in a text or viewed on a screen.
And here precisely lies the importance of the collection: it engages
history, to be sure, but above all it engages representations of history and
the various mediating discourses that shape it.
The insights provided into these representations prove to be both
satisfying and useful throughout Cartografías,
and will no doubt help readers understand not only the Spain of 1981 but also
the Spain of today.
David K. Herzberger
University of California,
Riverside
