By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination by William Viestenz

Reviewed by: By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination by William Viestenz Eugenia Afinoguénova KEYWORDS Sacred, Nationalism, Franco Regime (1939-1975), Iberian Studies, Political Imagination WILLIAM VIESTENZ. By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination. U of Toronto P, 2015. 223 pp. As T-shirts of La Roja (currently less successful on the field than in the national imagination) and snapshots of Holy Week processions continue to dominate Spain's brand image, it is hard to overestimate the usefulness of sacred or sanctified symbols in preserving Spanish nationalism in the age of official secularization. What happens, however, to this happy partnership of sovereignty and mystical unity when the state enshrines Catholicism itself to assert nationhood, as occurred during Franco's regime? This is the question hovering over William Viestenz's fascinating book as it looks back at the "Francoist alliance of the political and the theological" from the vantage point of present-day post-secularism (3). Jo Labanyi's Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (1989) and Noel Valis's Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (2010), which Viestenz cites among many others, have uncovered the importance of fiction in supplying modern visions of sacred communities, subjects, objects, and values to soothe anxieties caused by Spain's incomplete secularization. A welcome and well-informed addition to this body of work, Viestenz's study approaches literature as a channel for "political imagination" that disrupted or reasserted Franco's National-Catholicism by laying bare the inconspicuous consequences of its rituals: the closure of time, the abolishing of mercy and grace, scapegoating, and other manifestations of exclusionary violence triggered by fear of contamination. Carefully avoiding simplistic conflation of the Catholic and the sacred, Viestenz's research is grounded in Carl Schmitt's assertion in Political Theology that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (qtd. in Viestenz 4). Viestenz's approach to "sacred nationalism" is informed by thinkers ranging from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to María Zambrano, from Hannah Arendt to Slavoj Žižek. Having succinctly explained in chapter 1 how nations are reified metaphysically as sacred entities and what literature has to do with it, the author turns, in chapter 2, to what he considers the pivotal moment when the "thinking of 'Spanishness' through religious terms" shifted to a metaphysical, superficially secularized "category of self-immanence": the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regeneracionista discourse (12). The book's subsequent chapters offer theoretically lucid and historically contextualized close readings of several texts, both canonical and little-known, written in either Spanish or Catalan by authors who worked in different parts of the Peninsula and in the diaspora: Incerta glòria by Joan Sales (1956–1981) in chapter 3, Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián by Juan Goytisolo (1970) in chapter 4, Volverás a Región by Juan Benet (1967) and La mort i la primavera by Mercé Rodoreda (1961–1986) in chapter 5, Tiempo de silencio and Tiempo de destrucción by Luis Martín Santos (1961 and 1975) in chapter 6, and, finally, Les hores, El caminant i el mur, Final del laberint, and La pell de brau—four books of poetry by Salvador Espriu (1952, 1954, 1955, and 1960, respectively) in chapter 7. As the author explains, such a "chronological span corresponds, not coincidentally, to a post-Second World War retrenchment within Francoist rhetoric of a sacred mandate to promote Spain's Catholic first causes" (13). [End Page 128] The readings are well grounded in the author's knowledge of the conditions of production and circulation of each text. The book's main focus, however, are the characters, chronotopes, plots, and language that reveal how fictional communities are bound together by processes of exclusion, purification, consecration of communal spirits, and reification of enemies. Thus, the analysis of Joan Sales's Incerta glòria illustrates the mechanisms of victimhood and scapegoating. The chapter on Juan Goytisolo argues that Conde Don Julian's relevant profanation of Spain's tribal idols nevertheless collapses with the imposition of a new "structural authority" embodied in...

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