Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography by Sebastiaan Faber

Author:Sebastiaan Faber [Faber, Sebastiaan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spain & Portugal, Europe, Modern, 20th Century, Political Science, History, Human Rights
ISBN: 9780826504050
Google: a7wpEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 34409290
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2018-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

8

An Epidemic of Mediocrity

Spain According to Gregorio Morán

GREGORIO MORÁN IS A PAIN IN THE NECK. He’s the child who embarrasses his parents by observing truths that polite society prefers to leave unmentioned (“Daddy, why is that man so ugly?”). It is no surprise that Crítica, an imprint owned by the conglomerate that includes the publishing company Planeta, tried to censor El cura y los mandarines (The priest and the mandarins), Morán’s no-holds-barred account of more than thirty years of Spanish culture, covering the last decades of the Franco regime and the first of post-Franco democracy. Nor is it surprising that Morán refused to budge. Reportedly, the stumbling block was a short chapter in which Morán targeted Spain’s Royal Academy of Language—particularly its former director, the literary scholar Víctor García de la Concha, whom he characterized as a careerist of limited intellectual abilities. (Crítica: “Gregorio, don’t be rude. Please apologize to Mr. García de la Concha.” Gregorio: “I don’t want to! He deserves it!”) When Crítica’s failed attempt to have the chapter cut became public in late 2014, Morán branded the publisher’s pressure as a form of financial rather than political censorship. The conglomerate called off the project, he said, because it was not willing to risk its profitable partnership with the Royal Academy that allows it to publish the Academy’s best-selling dictionary. The scandal helped generate publicity for Morán’s book, which finally came out with Akal (2014). But, even without the public quarrel, the book would have made plenty of noise. Morán’s monumental account is impossible to ignore—although some have certainly attempted to wish it away, as the novelist Juan Goytisolo (2015) pointed out in an op-ed for El País. El cura y los mandarines takes us on a journey through thirty-four years of Spanish culture, from the landmark 1962 until 1996, which signaled the end of a decade and a half of Socialist rule. The panorama is nothing short of devastating. It is very hard indeed to imagine the emperor properly dressed after eight hundred pages of grotesque and ridiculous nakedness.

Morán (born in Oviedo in 1947) is an anomaly in Spain: a fiercely independent journalist. As a student in Madrid he joined the Communist Party (PCE) and was active in the anti-Franco opposition. After spending several years exiled in Paris, where he wrote for the Party’s paper, Mundo Obrero, he returned to Spain, left the PCE, and joined the young weekly Cambio 16. While making a name for himself as a ruthlessly muckraking reporter, he also embarked on a career as a political and cultural historian. In 1979, he published a biography of then prime minister Adolfo Suárez; among his other books are a critical history of the Spanish Communist Party since the end of the Civil War (1986); a demythologizing history of the Transition (1991) that prefigured the later, critical reading of the period; and an unforgiving biography of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1998). Since the 1980s, he’s provided biting commentary on current events in a weekly column in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia.

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