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Abstract
This article contrasts autobiographies and memoirs written during the post-Franco transition period, exploring the political subjectivities of male and female figures who had been active in the Falangist movement. While the male memoirs emphasize thickening individual agency and unfolding autonomy, the female memoirs are more relational—less individualizing, more heteronomous and displaying an intense preoccupation with and anxiety about fidelity, continuity and lineage. The article argues that the emphasis on fidelity in the women writers' accounts is, at least in part, a function of specific political events—the enforced unification of Nationalist forces in 1937—rather than simply arising from an exaltation of tradition and the fetishizing of essentialized gender norms. The burden of loyalty assumed by the female Falangists after the unification process becomes emplotted into the autobiographical self constructed in their memoirs, reminding us that these women were complex political subjects, even if denied such an identity by the State to which they pledged allegiance.
Notes
* I hope that Professor Mackenzie can forgive the fact that this article deals with subjects so far removed from her own research interests. Its only—tangential—link to our valued colleague is provided by the theme of loyalty: there could be no more loyal and tenacious defender of the Bulletin’s values and legacy, and all editors, past and present, owe her the most immense debt of gratitude as well as our admiration.
1 James D. Fernández, Apology to Apostrophe: Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in Spain (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1992), 5.
2 Raimundo Fernández de la Cuesta, Testimonio, recuerdos y reflexiones (Madrid: Dyrsa, 1985).
3 Pilar Primo de Rivera, Recuerdos de una vida (Madrid: Dyrsa, 1983). Further references are to this edition and will be given in the text.
4 Dionisio Ridruejo, Casi unas memorias: con fuego y con raíces, ed. César Armando Gómez, pról. Salvador de Madariaga (Barcelona: Planeta, 1976). Further references are to this edition and will be given in the text.
5 Pedro Laín Entralgo, Descargo de conciencia, 1930–1960 (Barcelona: Barral, 1976). Further references will be given in the text.
6 Both volumes were published by Planeta in Barcelona, in 1982 and 1984 respectively, under the overarching title Pequeña historia de ayer. References to these works are given in the body of the article.
7 See, for example, Sarah Leggott, ‘Testimony, Gender, and Ideology in Mercedes Formica's Pequeña historia de ayer’, Letras Peninsulares, 12:2–3 (1999), 421–35; Francisco Javier Higuero, ‘La dialéctica del abrazo en Descargo de conciencia de Laín Entralgo’, Ojáncano: Revista de Literatura Española, 19 (2001), 35–54; Inbal Ofer, ‘Fragmented Autobiographies: A Style of Writing or Self-perception? The Case of Pilar Primo de Rivera’, Iberoamericana, 9 (2003), 37–52; Álvaro Romero-Marco, ‘Memorias, confesiones y recuerdos de la mala conciencia en Ramón Serrano Suñer, Pedro Laín Entralgo y Dionisio Ridruejo’, Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios, 35 (2007), <http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/malacon.html> (accessed 29 August 2014); Ricardo Krauel, ‘Dos asedios heterodoxos a la memoria del falangismo: Casi unas memorias de Dionisio Ridruejo y Memorias de un dictador de Ernesto Giménez Caballero’, in El diario como forma narrativa. IX Simposio Internacional sobre Narrativa Hispánica Contemporánea, El Puerto de Santa María, noviembre 2001 (El Puerto de Santa María [Cádiz]: Fundación Luis Goytisolo, 2002), 123–33.
8 As a concept, political subjectivity focuses on how identity is formed by conscious and unconscious political beliefs, commitments and affiliations: as Gina Herrmann points out, it usefully challenges the assumption that intimacy and ideology are lived out in separate spheres (Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain [Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2010], xii).
9 Herrmann, Written in Red, 11–14.
10 See, for example, the memoir by Magui de León Llorente, which she entitled, with a glorious lack of self-awareness, Las voces del silencio: memorias de una Instructora de Juventudes de la SF (Madrid: M. L. de León, 2000).
11 Alex Vernon, ‘Introduction: No Genre's Land. The Problem of Genre in War Memoirs and Military Autobiographies', in Arms and the Self: War, the Military and Autobiographical Writing, ed. Alex Vernon (Kent, OH/London: Kent State U. P., 2005), 1–40 (p. 20).
12 See, for example, Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1987) and, on relationality in particular, Susan Stanford Friedman's 1988 essay ‘Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice’, reproduced in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith & Julia Watson (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 72–82. Of course, as Smith acknowledges, the analytical purchase of attempts to read tendencies in life writing in terms of gender is limited, and is open to contestation. But for Smith, such an approach is justified if the autobiographical self is understood as a cultural and linguistic ‘fiction’ constituted through historical ideologies of selfhood and the ways in which it is narrativized. Such an approach attempts to acknowledge the contextual influence of historical phenomena by accounting for the multiple social determinants of selfhood (Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography, 45).
13 Ridruejo's memoir contains a more accurate account of the ‘Unification’ process: ‘Desde la fecha misma de su consumación, empecé a calificar al acto de la Unificación de milicias del 37 como un golpe de estado a la inversa. Con ello, quería decir que—al contrario de lo sucedido en Rusia y luego en Italia y en Alemania—no era un partido mesiánico el que se había apoderado del Estado sino el Estado—su jefe—el que se había apoderado de los partidos fundiéndolos para acomodarlos a sus propósitos’ (Casi unas memorias, 106).
14 Primo de Rivera was consistently coy about the date she decided to adopt Teresa as patron saint. In her memoir, she raises the matter in the broad context of some of the problems the SF and the wider Falange faced during the period the organization was quartered in Salamanca (this included the Unification process), and says simply ‘Por aquellos días [ … ] quisimos reforzar nuestras defensas espirituales, y envié una circular a las provincias liberadas proclamando a Santa Teresa, Patrona de la Sección Femenina’ (Recuerdos de una vida, 103; emphasis added). A much more contemporaneous reference, dated 1938, is also vague. In a circular dated 15 October 1938, she writes: ‘El año pasado, en día como hoy, fué nombrada Patrona de la SF de FET y de las JONS Santa Teresa de Jesús’ (Real Academia de Historia, Archivo Documental de la Asociación Nueva Andadura, Serie Azul, Carpeta 2, Circular 10 bis 1938). The very imprecision of the references may suggest that Primo de Rivera was unwilling to make any link with Unification explicit.
15 Explaining her choice of Teresa as patron saint for the SF in a section where she discusses the organization's wartime struggles, Primo de Rivera makes a pointed reference to her ‘autenticidad’, and adds: ‘Teniéndola por Patrona no caben ni melindres ni falsedades, sino verdad, alegría, decisión’ (Recuerdos de una vida, 104). The invocation of the saint's power to enhance the SF's ‘decisión’ is particularly interesting in light of the comments about war and agency above.
16 As part of a long and fervent paean to the saint, to be read to SF members on Teresa's feast day in 1940, Primo de Rivera writes: ‘Antes [sic] las dificultades de quienes han de crearlo e improvisarlo todo, ante las críticas, los obstáculos, las deslealtades y las traiciones, debemos acordarnos de nuestra Patrona’ (Real Academia de la Historia, Archivo Documental de la Asociación Nueva Andadura, Serie Azul, Carpeta 2, Circular 166. 8.10.1940; emphasis added).
17 See the chapter ‘El descontento de la Falange’, in Recuerdos de una vida. 185–89.
18 For example, ‘La cultura, la inteligencia, el amor al trabajo, fueron indicios judaicos’ (Visto y vivido, 120). I am not implying that such statements counter Formica's anti-semitic comments elsewhere: philo-semitism is structured by the same type of gross generalization and essentialism as anti-semitism.
19 ‘Las chicas estudiantes ocupaban, frente a la sociedad, una situación ambigua, mezcla de prostitutas y “cómicas” que quizás fuese rescoldo de la enconada contienda que había dividido a cristianos viejos y conversos’ (Visto y vivido, 12–13).
20 For example, immediately after a long section in which Formica reflects on the history of the three cultures of medieval Iberia and its legacy for Jews and conversos after 1492, stressing the intellectuality of Jews, the scorn for intelligence and culture demonstrated by the old Christians, and the insecurity, upheaval and shame which those of Jewish heritage suffered in the early modern period, she details the insecurity and upheaval she and her family suffered after her father left them. She also notes the consolation she takes at this time in frequenting circles in which intellect and cultural refinement were valued. This is not to suggest that she equates the two forms of suffering in any crude or direct way; nevertheless, an association is established, consciously or unconsciously, both by the proximity of the episodes, and the parallel effects they produce on the respective subjects (Visto y vivido, 117–24).
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.