By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination by William Viestenz (review)

Plunging into William Viestenz’s book By the Grace of God is like jumping into the middle of an ongoing conversation. However, it is not a conversation among strangers, but, quite the contrary, among dear friends with whom it is always a pleasure to speak because we are always greeted by new ideas and new possibilities. The interlocutors are so familiar to us that we do not need an introduction: Joan Sales, Juan Goytisolo, Luis Martín Santos, Mercè Rodoreda, Juan Benet, and Salvador Espriu, together with illustrious theorists and thinkers that expand and enhance new approaches to the works of these well-known authors, offering us new readings that situate them in a wider and increasingly productive context.

William Viestenz’s original study sets its sights on the ideological construction of Francoism in order to uncover how the sacred/secular binary that came to establish the concept of sovereignty during the dictatorship was employed to define and shape diverse ideas about what a modern nation in the Iberian Peninsula is and how it operates. In this fashion, contemporary Spain becomes a textual discourse in which to locate forms of power that channel and manipulate political thought through a Catholic mythology that offers collective modes of identification to substitute the lay principles of the Enlightenment. Francoism here serves as a point of departure for a detailed textual analysis of the works of the aforementioned authors, with Viestenz turning to novels as well as poetry as he demonstrates how the dictatorship created an extreme rhetoric of sacred purification and exceptionalism that wound up configuring not just the political state of the past but also the cultural environment of the present in Spain. The author consequently shows how the sanctity of supposedly secular symbolism is generated through the arts and culture, which can function as political agents per se, whether because of how they react to preceding ideologies or how they challenge the alleged truths that are already integrated and accepted in the social milieu of the moment.

The two main organizing principles of By the Grace of God lie in this innovative perspective and converge to give us a revitalized conception of Iberian studies. In the first place, the proposition that guides the author’s main narration is the sacred/secular binary, and how the former stretches out toward and subsumes the latter, thus prevailing in the formation of a national secular identity. The second axis of this study refers to the formation of an Iberian canon that challenges the traditional perspective of Hispanic studies, which, while initially appearing to be a question of perspective that only affects the selection of texts chosen for analysis, actually becomes an essential element of Viestenz’s proposal.

The structure of the book responds, in turn, to the development of this gray area in which the sacred merges with a secular political imaginary. In this context, Francoism serves the author to mount a theoretical framework that allows him to analyze the chosen works and the contexts in which they develop. To that end, the introduction and the second chapter, “He aquí una plenitud española,” reach back to the nineteenth century and trace the origin and development of the notion of a sacred Spain as a political category and a tool for the discursive construction of the national imagination. To do so, Viestenz resorts to two key concepts, Nietzschean religion and post-secularism, which allow him to elaborate an analytic vocabulary that he will apply to a detailed analysis of his selected literary works and which he will continue to develop and expand as the book advances. For example, the concept of history developed by Hegel serves Viestenz to see how Franco’s discourse fits into liberalism in spite of the fact that during the nineteenth century it was precisely an anti-Hegelian analysis of history that was used to locate the source of public...