New Spain, New Literatures

Afterword: Regarding the Spain of Others: Sociopolitical Framing of New Literatures /Cultures in Democratic Spain

261 u Afterword Regarding the Spain of Others: Sociopolitical Framing of New Literatures / Cultures in Democratic Spain Germán Labrador Méndez (Translated by Jeff Lawrence) An artifact sums up perfectly the intersection of forces established in the first years of Spanish democratic culture: El imperio contraataca (1985), a video clip by the musical group Los Nikis in which Philip the Second appears in the garden of the Retiro de Madrid, accompanied by three electric guitarists, all in the dress of the Golden Age. The monarch’s moves are compulsive, frenetic. He spins on the floor like a child; he shouts, applauds, laughs. Between shots, the image of a man in a straitjacket appears. The maniacal return of the empire: “Hace mucho tiempo que se acabó, / pero es que hay cosas que nunca se olvidan, / por mucho tiempo que pase. / 1582, / el sol no se ponía en nuestro Imperio, / me gusta mucho esa frase” (Nikis, 1985) (It ended long ago, / but there are things that are never forgotten, / no matter how much time passes. / 1582, / the sun did not set on our Empire, / I love that phrase a lot).1 This document says much about the configuration of contemporary Spanish culture , not only because it belongs to the national prehistory of a genre—the video clip—which expresses aesthetic relations traditionally associated with the poetic space, nor because it indicates the emergence of youth culture, nor even because it is an object that calls on us to reconsider the significance of the misunderstood culture of the Movida. The imperial counter-text announced by this “pop” monarch parodies , of course, the historical meta-narrative of franquismo, but not of franquismo alone. If the Transition to democracy saw the opposition between the slogan “con Franco vivíamos mejor” (we were better off with Franco) and “contra Franco vivíamos mejor” (we were better off against Franco), thus embodying a type of progressive culture on the brink of losing its progressiveness, in 1985, Los Nikis, following a tradition inherited from the libertarian culture of the 1970s, opposed both slogans 262 GERMÁN LABRADOR MÉNDEZ with a third: “we were better off with Philip the Second” (Sempere 155), making of the anachronism a political strategy. Because El Imperio contraataca no longer takes the Spanish Transition as a referent, despite having inherited its activist political culture . Its counter-text is, in 1985, projected against the cultural regime of a socialist Spain and its narrative of a reformulated national identity, that of a “euphoric country, European, socialdemocrat-happy, where irony and comedy seemed the only possible literary option” (Chirbes). Reductio ad Imperium. This satirical counter-text aspired to the status of an anomaly in the cultural field of the 1980s, resistant to certain cultural logics. It is true that its theme is the repetition of history, but only in order to problematize the national configuration in the process of its normalization, the key term in the vo­ cabu­ lary of the identity politics of the time. Normalization is, pace Gonzalo Navajas (in this volume), that place of discourse where an entire tradition (or two) of national political (and literary) thought come together in order to confront the 1980s as the decisive moment in which to resolve a structural anomaly linked to an incomplete process of modernization. The anti-franquista cultural world had already designated its present a time of deficit, and now, in the years of the construction of democratic institutions, these same cultural forces had assumed the task of financing its mortgage—a task they claimed to have completed from 1988–92, thus accomplishing the first shift in the history of Spanish democratic culture. The desire to be an empire again. In the varied repetitions of its discourse of grandeur , this video clip poses the proximity of the national narrative of franquismo with the celebratory discourse of a democratic Spain, signaling the specific site of this global return of the “Spanish”: in fashion, in gastronomy, and in the world of sports. These decisive sectors in the marketing of Spain as a world power are convoked according to the most reductive aesthetic marks of Spanish identity; its material culture of underdevelopment reappears in the “Spanish omelette,” its institutional folklore in the “red and yellow,” and its refurbished basketball team—its tall basketball team— works as a metonym for the demographic “overcoming” of a nutritional deficit. And on top of this essential abnormality is set Spain’s future condition as the country of arrival for...