“LA LITERATURA ES ESO, LITERATURA”: THE RHETORIC OF EMPTY CULTURE IN FRANCOIST AND NEO-FRANCOIST DISCOURSES

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Notes

1. In January 2008, the statue of Millán Astray that presided over a square in the city of A Coruña was dislodged and taken away, according to the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, which stipulated that all emblems of Francoism be removed from public space. Simultaneously, his title as A Coruña's favourite son was also removed. In August 2011, this title was restored after Millán Astray's daughter won a lawsuit that rendered the action illegal, in so far as her father had been granted this title in 1922, 14 years before the beginning of the Civil War and therefore, not strictly under Franco's rule.

2. Xosé Manuel Beiras, erstwhile leader of the Galician nationalist party (BNG), has recently called on Galician nationalists forcefully to oppose “a los neofascistas del PP” (see Salgado's “La corriente de Beiras”). In a similar vein, Catalan journalist Lluis Bassets argued in an article in El País (“El abuelo se ha hecho independentista”) that the identification between the PP and franquismo has been a central political strategy of the Catalan nationalist left.

3. In contrast with the repeated eulogy of many biographical subjects through a reference to their upper-class or aristocratic ascendancy, Xabier Arzalluz's entry begins with the deliberately disdainful “Hijo de un chófer de familia carlista que en la Guerra Civil (1936–1939) militó en el ejército nacional como requeté”. The description of Arzalluz's career as leader of the PNV is permeated by the rhetoric of Spanish centralism, with its use of terms such as “etnicista”, “separatista”, a passing reference to Sabino Arana, and, above all, the calculated association between Basque national politics and ETA (Diccionario Biográfico Español , vol. V: 732).

4. The question of heroic rhetoric in neo-Francoist discourse becomes acutely relevant if we again consider the Diccionario biográfico ’s entry on Esperanza Aguirre and its treatment of the fact that she had lived through a helicopter accident in 2005 and an attack in Mumbai in 2006. Her biographer, himself the Secretary of State during Aznar's government, reads such events as evidence that Esperanza Aguirre boasts “al lado del beneficio de la suerte, una capacidad especial para adoptar decisiones rápidas en situaciones críticas o para adaptarse a lo inesperado” (González y González 807).