“Nothing is uncontentious” announced Valentine Cunningham, speaking on the haunted cultural afterlife in Britain of the Spanish Civil War, now in its 75th anniversary year. Appearing with DJ Taylor, novelist, critic and biographer of Orwell, each discussed with lively, indeed, wholly materialistengagement the ‘ghostly’ versions of the War in cultural memory – chiefly as it exists in elegies, monuments, fiction and memoir. It was a session dense with heterogeneous cultural references and reminders of the disputation around canonical literary works, of which Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is the paradigm case. Much recollection, it was suggested, was both grief stricken and guilty; many memoirs were delayed and complicated by political confusion; there still exist forms of heroic identification and factionalized quarrels which intercept the production and reception of Civil War literature.
It is a joy of writers’ festivals that experts are allowed, and indeed encouraged, to engage in virtuosic excursiveness. In a wonderful moment, warming to the theme of displaced responses by British poets to the Spanish Civil War, DJ Taylor cited the punk rock band, The Clash, and their song “Spanish Bombs” in which the lead singer invokes the mayhem of the war when he is in a nightclub in Spain in 1975. Likewise, Pan’s Labyrinth was cited as an important revisionist allegory of the contestation of nationalist fascism.
Two weeks ago I appeared at the Hay Segovia festival and was keen to ask writers in Spain about the exhumation of the remains of Federico Garcia Lorca. Most I spoke to simply evaded the question. It is Lorca’s murder, Cunningham claims, that signifies symbolically the regime’s intolerance for art; the controversy over mass graves is the ghastly and material reminder – like the passage of the bullet through Orwell’s throat - of repressed and difficult narratives not yet fully visible.
Gail Jones will be appearing in L270 Writers-in-Residence, this Thursday at 8.45pm. Find out more here.
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