The Fascist Narrative of Concha Espina

The Fascist Narrative of Concha Espina Michael Ugarte University of Missouri It is well known among Hispanists that Concha Espina (1869-1955) was a fascist for a significant period of her life. Less well known, however, is the process which led her to that way of thinking, and even less familiar are the rhetorical apparatuses and structures of her narratives which undergird that political process. Indeed the language of Concha Espina demonstrates the manners in which politics and poetics converge at times treacherously. ' Clearly Espina was not the only prominent writer to have sung the praises of insurgent fascism in the Spain of the thirties and forties. Julio RodrÃ-guez Puértolas has offered what amounts to a catalogue of writers who at one or more points in their lives sided publically either with ultranationalist (anti-republican) positions or with the man who would become the most powerful symbol and proponent ofthat nationalism: José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Among those who figure on the Rodriguez Puértolas (black) list are none other than Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Camilo José Cela, as well as prominent writers of the early twentieth century such as Gregorio Marañón, Manuel Machado, Ortega y Gasset, and countless others—it is a two-volume work—, some of whom are still alive and now embarrassed for having expressed such opinions or having participated in what appears today as (at best) dubious political activity: authoritarian, absolutist, hierarchical, and imperialist. The appearance of fascist skeletons in the closet has obsessed historians and critics of European literature since the end of World War II, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 98 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies perhaps more so in countries other than Spain and Portugal, for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the Allied victory and immediate establishment of democratic institutions in most western European countries as a result of the war. Indeed the Peninsula is "different," since the skeletons were not exactly in the closet. It took them thirty-six years to get in, and even in 1975, the peaceful Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy was achieved, as we have been told on numerous occasions , amidst a spirit of reconciliarion. While the kind of tortuous moral and political introspection among German intellectuals of the post-war period was never part of Spanish political culture, there is ample evidence in the thirties, as RodrÃ-guez Puértolas's book shows, of an exuberant right-wing passion, a language that falls under the category of what Walter Benjamin called the aesthetization of politics ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" 241-42).2 Espinas civil-war work is an example, and although she became less committed to fascist ideology in the post-civil war period, she never broke with it publically, and as a result she was held in high regard by the Franco regime as is demonstrated by the street in Madrid named after her. Naturally Concha Espina is in RodrÃ-guez Puértolas's inventory as she should be (137-39, 398-99), yet women writers are not given a great deal of space. Mercifully, this is one of the few lists of prominent literary figures in which most of us are pleased not to see many women.3 Carmen Icaza, Rosa Aramburu, MarÃ-a Luisa Linares, Mercedes OrtoU, Concha Linares-Becerra, Mercedes Fórmica, along with Espina, all share an inclination toward the sentimental novel which was the appropriate genre for the shaping of young feminine sensibilities as to the morality of the fascist social project (RodrÃ-guez Puértolas 250; 492-93, 507), much within the ideology of Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of José Antonio, and head of Sección Femenina—the women's branch of the fascist Falange Española. The predilection for rigid gender roles can be linked to the fact that some women embraced fascism as an affirmation of the constructed truth behind those roles. Still, how do we deal with women fascist writers in the wake of late twentieth-century feminism? Admittedly, there were few, but these few might shed light on a variety of issues—not only the natuie of totalitarian...