This piece has appeared in The Montreal Review
The Way of the World
As Close to a Documentary Work of Fiction as Fiction Can Come: Ralph Bates’ The Olive Field
Last night I finished The Olive Field. It’s true, as Valentine Cunningham states in his 1986 introduction to the book (which was originally published in 1936), that “Bates…got inside of the character of Spanishness,” and took “the measure of the curiosities of Spanish political life and style,” that “he knew Spanish life as only a few British writers…have done.”
Upon opening this book I noted immediately Bates’ thorough knowledge of those things that would occupy his rural characters’ thought and feeling, and his ability to present all of these largely technical agricultural details naturally and fluently, with no intrusion whatsoever on the part of the narrator (Cunningham refers to this achievement as “a kind of seedsman’s or grower’s catalogue of technical terminology…that is as engrossing as it is informative”).
According to Cunningham, “Bates fiction plunges its reader into the barbaric oddness, the exotic difference of Spain,” which includes its “extreme weather.” He knows no other novel that “describes parching heat better than The Olive Field.”
And I agree as well that Bates seems far more familiar and knowledgeable when it comes to the political differences that fragmented Spanish society during the chaotic years that preceded the outbreak of the civil war. Whereas Orwell (who went to Spain for the first time to fight in 1936, while Bates had been living there continuously since 1923) admits to his ignorance of “the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names—P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., F.A.I, C.N.T, U.G.T, J.C.I, J.S.U., A.I.T—[which] merely exasperated”[1] him, Cunningham attributes to Bates’ novels (Lean Men as well as The Olive Field) a “patient” illustration of just “how much the great gulf dividing the Spanish Anarchists (the F.A.I) and their allies in the syndicalist trade union (the C.N.T.) from the Spanish Communist Party…interfered with simple revolutionary pastoralism, and generated unhealable rifts in Spanish agricultural (and urban) daily life.”
Indeed, less than two years after Bates’ documentary novel concludes (with the right-wing government’s quashing of the Asturian miners’ strike of 1934) these irreconcilable rifts would severely compromise and eventually undermine the Second Republic’s ability to fend off and defeat the military uprising that began on the 18th of July, 1936, when Franco—among others—instigated the coup d’etat that resulted in almost three years of total and fratricidal war.
And I agree, too, that “reality in The Olive Field is intensely symbolic.” But it is precisely this aspect of the novel which presents certain problems for a modern reader intimately familiar with Spain and Spanish life. “This intensifying, even overdetermination, of meaning, the persistent effort of the writing to perceive, arrest and squeeze out significance,” might “register with great power Bates’s sense of the historical importance of Spain’s Thirties’ crises.” But at the same time it converts the characters, individual as they might be, into stick men and women, lacking real psychological depth and distinction from one another.
By the time we get to the end of the story, where the failure of the Revolución de Asturias de 1934 provides a climactic funeral pyre for both Anarchist and Communist dreams and lives, we have been so often frustrated by Bates’ unwillingness to plumb the psychology of his characters beyond the stereotypical levels that are common currency outside of the country that they don’t mean much to us, and we don’t really care who dies, and who survives.
This, in my opinion, is the only shortcoming in an otherwise complete and remarkable novel. I can’t think of any other novel I’ve read that was written by someone who wasn’t Spanish and demonstrates so much accurate and almost rare knowledge of the nature and reality of Spanish life and its people. Of course the life presented in this novel is a life that, as far as many of its details are concerned, has little to do with the life we lead here today. The overwhelming power of the Church and its control of education, for example, the forced respect for its ceremonies, rituals and superstitions, is a relic of the past now, even though this isn’t quite a lay society (the Catholic Church in Spain is supported in part by government funds, i.e., tax Euros[2]).
But literary treatments of Spain—even by writers as worldly and accomplished and familiar with the country as Hemingway or Somerset Maugham—often flounder precisely in terms of this sort of accuracy, and therefore remain clichéd. Bates knew the land and its people like no other non-Spanish writer I’ve come across, but for some reason (it might have been ideological: he was an envoy of the Comintern, sent to Spain to stir up revolutionary fervor among Catalan dockers and fishermen) he felt compelled to sacrifice the complete individuality of his characters and their emotional autonomy for their representative capacities. As Cunningham points out, writers in the Thirties were “obsessed by utopia,” and this might explain Bates’ shortcoming.
Seventy-five years after the ‘facts’ portrayed in this excellent work of fiction we are all relatively jaded, and no longer believe that there is such a thing as utopia. What’s more, we are better equipped emotionally to accept and deal with this absence and we need in place of idealistic abstractions realistic men and women we can actually identify with and relate to, instead of two-dimensional puppets manipulated by an ideologue, no matter how noble his cause.
What’s Behind the Visceral Reaction to the 2011 Ballon d’Or?
For those who follow the world’s most popular sport—what in the United States is called soccer and the rest of the world football—the awarding of the FIFA Ballon d’Or to Lionel Messi for the second consecutive year is a matter of some interest. Here in Spain, where Messi plays for the Catalan football club FC Barcelona, no one doubts that he is—as the winner of the Ballon d’Or is meant, or reputed, to be—the world’s best soccer player. But the Spanish press and many Spaniards are incensed that neither of the two Spanish finalists for this award received the prize, especially given that, since 1995, the winner of the Ballon d’Or has always been, in those years when a World Cup was played, a member of the team that won that competition. And last summer the Spanish won the World Cup for the first time in their history, and deservedly so.
What makes this debate particularly curious is that no one in Spain (or at least hardly anyone) disputes the fact that Lionel Messi is, right now, and without a doubt, the single best and by the far the most talented and well-rounded individual soccer player in the world. Messi, who was born in Argentina and plays for the Argentinean national side (which, under the guidance of their iconic and problematic national football hero, Diego Maradona, shamefully exited the last World Cup as soon as they had to confront a serious opponent without the aid of disastrous refereeing), moved with his family to Europe when he was twelve years old because he suffered from a growth hormone deficiency and FC Barcelona’s scouts had recognized his promise and offered treatment and training in the famed football school they run, at La Masía de Can Planas, known simply as La Masía.
La Masía is rightly regarded as the finest factory of young football talent in the world, and the philosophy and training provided by this youth academy—where the kids study not only football but all of the subjects that boys their age study anywhere—are ultimately responsible not only for FC Barcelona’s recent dominance of the game, particularly when it comes to the style of their play, and in Europe as well as Spain, but of the success of the Spanish national team, La Roja, which has won not only the last World Cup but, two years prior to that, the last European Cup as well (of the 23 players who went to South Africa last summer to defend the national colors, seven—six of whom were instrumental in winning the World Cup trophy for Spain—played for Barcelona at that time, while another had recently been signed and a ninth player, like all of the FC Barcelona players chosen to participate in the squad, was a product of La Masía).
Everyone agrees that this year the real winner of the Ballon d’Or was La Masía, since three of its former pupils stood on the podium as finalists for the prize. And no one doubts that the three of them deserved to be there, though some might have placed the Spanish goalie Iker Casillas up there with them, since he was responsible for keeping his goal empty in all but the first World Cup game, including the final and, like Iniesta—who struck home the winning goal in overtime in the final and thereby unleashed spontaneous national euphoric celebrations of unity such as Spain had never witnessed before—was the central character of particularly dramatic moments in the tournament.
The third finalist for the prize, Xavi Hernández, is rightfully regarded as the director of the orchestra in both Barça and La Roja, the one man most responsible for connecting the rearguard with the offensive forces, and something of a genius when it comes to passing the ball. Xavi, whose role in assuring that Barcelona would win all of the six competitions they vied for last season (2009-2010, a feat no other team on the planet has ever matched) and both the last European and World Cups, is undoubtedly the best and most gifted midfielder around. It’s my opinion that the recent successes of both Barça and La Roja are due in large part to his unfailing contributions to the symphonic play that characterizes both teams, that he was indispensible—and simply irreplaceable—in both squads.
In light of the vicious reaction in the Spanish press it should be pointed out that the winner of the Ballon d’Or is that individual who scores the most points in a democratic (some say too democratic) poll conducted among sports writers and the trainers (coaches) and captains of the world’s professional and national football teams. Hence, as one Spanish commentator pointed out, the opinion of the Malaysian national coach carries the same weight as the Brazilian national coach (the sarcastic implication being that the former knows a hell of a lot less about football than the latter).
Still, it’s important to bear in mind that the winner is the one who gets the most votes when this poll is conducted (the poll used to be conducted by the French magazine France Football, but has recently been taken over, or usurped, by FIFA, the International Federation of Association Football, the organization responsible for organizing both the European and World Cups, and which used to award what was called the FIFA World Player prize for the best individual football player in any given year).
Despite everything I’ve recounted above, last night everyone in Spain was surprised to learn that Messi had won the prize for the second year in a row, including myself, and despite his success with Barça and an amazing number of—and particularly individual way of making brilliant—goals. The Spanish press had been speculating for a long time on who the winner would be, and their collective opinion led all of us to believe that it was most likely to be Iniesta. But apparently Messi received just over 22% of the votes in the FIFA poll, whereas Xavi and Iniesta ‘divided’ the ‘Spanish’ vote, with each of them receiving about 18%.
But since the results of the poll were released the Spanish press—and many Spaniards—have been crying foul, as if this were an election in some Banana Republic and the ballots had been stuffed. Not only have they attacked FIFA (for what?), but they’ve once again adopted an attitude of having been treated badly, and victimized. Many comments, in both the press and the associated readers’ list of responses to the articles, have used the word ‘unjust,’ but given all I’ve said above it is very difficult to see what was unjust about the voting, or precisely where the injustice might lie.
Granted FIFA has its own agenda, and whereas the last (and only) time a Spaniard won the trophy, back in 1960, the award ceremony was not a major media event. But what does that fact have to do with the votes that were cast? These voters all over the world were asked to rank three players who, in their estimation, were the best in the world during the past year (2010). And the three best players, according to this poll, were Messi, Xavi and Iniesta.
I’ve been living in Spain a long time, so the fact is I don’t know how other national presses react to events like this, if there is the same intense nationalist—yes, nationalist—feeling for national victories and defeats in the sporting arena. I do know—having been raised in the States, where I remember those bumper stickers from the sixties and early seventies which read: Our Country, Love it or Leave It—that simplistic ‘patriotic’ sentiment is not unique to Spain. But what is unique to Spain, or seems so to me to be so at any rate, is this self-pitying attitude that emerges, and is used to justify sporting failures, whenever a Spaniard or Spanish team doesn’t get what it bid for (including, for example, the Spanish bid to host the 2018 World Cup; though this is something that is at least beginning to change, with so many ‘Spanish’ victories in so many different sports: soccer, tennis (Rafael Nadal), basketball (Pau Gasol of the L.A. Lakers and the national squad), motorcycle racing and a host of other sports that habitually receive less press, including karate, volleyball, water polo, lacrosse, etc.).
So I am baffled anew by the lamentable Spanish habit of feeling sorry for oneself. And I have to wonder where this comes from. I don’t think it’s necessarily an historic character trait. When reading about the Spanish Civil War, for example, one never comes across anything like this, never. Spaniards are always described by the foreigners who went to fight for the Republic or report on the war in the best of terms, their warmhearted openness and generosity and fundamental humanity being the primary and endearing characteristics that the foreigners remember. When Spaniards had most cause to cry foul and see themselves as being treated unjustly, they spent far more energy simply getting on with it than lamenting their dire situation. So I wonder when this sense of being discriminated against first came into play here. It might possibly have arisen out of the post-war frustrations, the bitter disappointment on the part of the republicans when the Allies failed to remove Franco from power and eventually invited him to join the United Nations. That would certainly make sense, and indeed that was a real and even wicked injustice, and one worthy of the name.
But I’m guessing that this self-pitying attitude derives above all from Franco’s own hyper-nationalism, and even his weird and fanciful ideas concerning autarky. For forty years Spaniards were cowed into abject submission, after having been subjected to the most horrific and degrading treatment imaginable. The Spanish Civil War was the first war in which terror bombing was employed. From early November of 1936 until late March of 1939 shells were routinely fired into the center of Madrid, which resisted the fascist aggression with very little outside help for almost three whole years. During that time women and children and noncombatants in general lived while starving and died by chance in the city, without anyone in the world who was in a position to do much about it really giving a damn. Following the lead of the British ruling classes, everything was done in the international arena to directly or indirectly limit and thwart the democratically elected government’s chances of defending itself and winning the war. In this way the ruling classes of Great Britain in particular—and with them, those of France and the United States—contributed decisively to Franco’s victory. And Franco’s celebration of his victory didn’t end with the last gasp of the Republic in the spring of 1939. Even while lying practically comatose on his deathbed the vindictive dictator was able to sign a last death warrant as late as 1975.
The disputes and tensions that led to the Spanish Civil War remain in the hearts and minds of many Spaniards today. The split between Right and Left is as deep as it ever was, though it’s unlikely to lead to violence. But the debate between opposing factions is as nasty and immoderate as it is in the States, where the recent shooting in Tucson might not have been caused by the bitter and uncompromising political climate, but is no doubt a manifestation of that hostility coupled with the insane ease of acquiring automatic weapons. Curiously, here in Spain, a triumph like last summer’s World Cup victory is capable of bringing everyone together in a massive outpouring of rich and positive emotion. Unfortunately, a ‘defeat’ like last night’s vote ‘against’ the Spanish candidates for the Ballon d’Or also unites this country in an eruption of victimist moaning, a legacy perhaps of the civil war that preceded the unprecedented destruction of the last World War.
p.s. Three or four days after I posted this comment, John Carlin, who contributes to El País, made a very similar observation, lamenting in his weekly sports commentary—El Córner Inglés—the Spanish reaction (in Spanish):
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)