Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936

Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936

An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Franco's Spain True, false, or both? Spain's 1939–75 dictator, Francisco Franco, was a pioneer of water conservation and sustainable energy. Pedro Almodóvar is only the most recent in a line of great antiestablishment film directors who have worked continuously in Spain since the 1930s. As early as 1943, former Republicans and Nationalists were collaborating in Spain to promote the visual arts, irrespective of the artists' political views. Censorship can benefit literature. Memory is not the same thing as history. Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe―wrongly―that under Franco's fascist dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In his groundbreaking new book, Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 , Jeremy Treglown argues that oversimplifications like these of a complicated, ambiguous actuality have contributed to a separate falsehood: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget the evils for which Franco's side (and, according to this version, his side alone) was responsible. The myth that truthfulness was impossible inside Franco's Spain may explain why foreign narratives ( For Whom the Bell Tolls , Homage to Catalonia ) have seemed more credible than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de España was, as its Spanish name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to make a more public attempt to "reclaim" its modern history of fascism. How it is doing so, and the role played in the process by notions of historical memory, are among the subjects of this wide-ranging and challenging book. Franco's Crypt reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's actually there―monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, video games―and considers, in a captivating narrative, the totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew. “A discerning, provocative book, part travelogue, part reflection on how memory passes into history, and part cultural narrative, Franco's Crypt establishes that much more was going on during Franco's regime than is usually credited. Touching on prickly issues with the pragmatic detachment of a foreigner, Mr. Treglown shows that subversive elements were at play in art, literature and cinema, and that a cautious yet irreversible process of modernity had begun long before Franco's death . . . Franco's Crypt [is] an unflinching addition to the literature on contemporary Spanish history and a cautionary tale about the nature of the beasts invoked by the political manipulation of bad memories. It also serves as a thought-provoking study on artistic expression under authoritarian regimes.” ― Valerie Miles, The New York Times “ Franco's Crypt . . . provides by far the best, and most objective, brief introduction to Spain's memory wars to be found in any language . . . Mr. Treglown offers a stimulating new reading of the chief milestones of Spanish culture since 1939. In doing so, he highlights the vitality of the country's artistic activity under Franco, subjecting the standard leftist narrative of a culturally stale Francoist Spain to sharp contradiction.” ― Stanley Payne, The Wall Street Journal “[Treglown] brilliantly captures the ways that circumstances affect writers' lives and work in accounts of his own visits to gravesites, in his stories of monuments and archives, and in profiles of novelists, historians, filmmakers, and architects grappling with an autocratic regime . . . Behind the lines, Treglown observes, many artists and writers refused both to act as propagandists or to be silenced. This is where his book is especially powerful. His inquiries into the Spanish past recover experiences and efforts that don't fit neatly into the rival rhetorics. Franco's legacies had deep effects throughout Spain but were more complex than has been acknowledged . . . Franco's Crypt questions both the fabrication of Franco's legitimacy and the one-dimensional view that his regime crushed all creative voice and expression . . . [Treglown] is unsparing in his indictments of the regime, but this does not prevent him from showing how Spaniards created art and literature even in the depths of the dictatorship, with much independent work accomplished before Franco's death. Treglown's account overturns the conventional view that the transition to democracy had to wait until Franco's death.” ― Jeremy Adelman, The New York Review of Books “ Franco's Crypt , the latest book by the British literary critic Jeremy Treglown, is so refreshing. In his focus on the surprising richness of Spanish culture since the war, Treglown pushes back against a knee-jerk pro-Republican perspective--not by apologizing for the Nationalists but simply by abstaining from projecting his own moral stance on the culture of