The Generation Game: Javier Cercas, Podemos and the (Im)Possibility of Progressive Politics in Spain1

The general elections held on December 20, 2015 were the most unpredictable and bitterly fought in Spain since 1979. This was the cause and the consequence of the rise of new political parties, most noticeably Podemos and Ciudadanos, who have translated into political currency the discontent and energy of the "15-M"movement, a shorthand for anti-austerity movement(s) that references the occupation of major squares throughout Spain by the so-called "indignados" in May 2011. The writings on and by Podemos frequently speak of "una segunda Transición," a challenge to the "régimen del 78" that midwifed the Transition from Francoism to a liberal monarchical democracy. This article employs Javier Cercas's historical novel, Anatomía de un instante, about the failed coup attempt of 1981, as a means to contextualize and critically engage with the Podemos platform at a time when the Spanish political scene appears to be divided at least as much on generational as on ideological grounds.

If all US citizens have their own theory on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a pre-requisite for being a Spaniard is claiming to know the "real story" of what happened on February 23, 1981, when tanks were rolled onto the streets of Madrid and Valencia, while Lieutenant Colonel Tejero held MPs hostage in Parliament. This, at least, was the claim made by Javier Cercas in his inaugural lecture as Weidenfeld Chair in Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford in May 2015. The author also cautioned the audience against the multitude of his compatriots who boast of their anti-Franco credentials; on Cercas's calculations, a mere 0.5% actively opposed the illegal insurrectionist who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975.²

Anatomía de un instante is a historically rigorous literary rumination on the day when the formal investiture of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, a legally-elected MP from the centre-right Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD), as Prime Minister was interrupted by military force, and demands were made for General Alfonso Armada to be appointed as President of a provisional government. More importantly, perhaps, Cercas interrogates the meaning of democracy, a particularly loaded term and concept at a time when Spaniards are increasingly suspicious of what was once assumed to be an exemplary Transition, questioning to what extent it facilitated the continuation of dictatorial practices to the present-day. It is the most socially significant socio-political novelistic intervention in Spain since Ian Gibson's The Death of Lorca.

Even Cercas's most unforgiving critics must concede that he does his homework: Anatomía de un instante lends itself to inclusion on reading lists in history as much as literary courses. More contentious is the author's tendency to write himself into his narratives, and his characteristic melding of fact and fiction. A recurring theme in Cercas's oeuvre is the split-second heroic actions of individuals whose personalities and psychological make-up are far from commendable (see Wheeler, "Anatomy"). In the case at hand, the task he sets himself is to employ a novelist's skills to explore what went through the heads of the only three MPs—Santiago Carrillo, leader of the Communist Party; Adolfo Suárez, the outgoing President; and General Gutiérrez Mellado, the Deputy Prime Minister—to defy Tejero, when their personal and political biographies contained little to suggest more than a reluctant commitment to democracy.

The pre-histories of Carrillo and Gutiérrez Mellado situate the titular moment within an epic landscape. The former was a key player in the 1934 illegal uprising against the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936), and it was on his watch (although probably not his orders) that the massacre of civilians and soldiers—from which Gutiérrez Mellado was fortunate to escape—took place in Paracuellos during the early months of the Civil War. Anatomía de un instante hardly shies away from critiques of the architects of the Transition, but its deconstruction of far from great men conceals a tendentious narrative and...