Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  For Carl Schmitt, the synarchist Joseph de Maistre, the traditionalist Louis de Bonald and the Catholic fundamentalist Donoso were the doctrinal trinity on which to build the ‘new order’. The new version of the Holy Empire. Donoso Cortés wrote the only great speech nineteenth-century Spanish fundamentalism managed to export with a degree of success to the rest of Europe. Not surprising. The so-called Speech on Dictatorship, delivered on 4 January 1849 in the Congress of Deputies, must rank as one of the most horrifying interventions ever to have been pronounced in a parliamentary chamber. The conservative majority’s whoops and applause are a vibrant part of the speech. Donoso does not hesitate to define dictatorship as a divine act, an order of Providence. The impact of the speech, whose content was nothing new, the reverberations it caused in conservative Europe, have something to do with its direct, apodictic style and intimidatory ending. It is probably the first Fascist discourse in the modern sense. Already, by the 1920s, it had captivated Schmitt, who was born in 1888 in Plettenberg, Westphalia, in a very conservative Catholic environment. In 1929, the German jurist and professor appeared in Madrid for the first time to deliver a lecture. What does he talk about? He reintroduces the Spanish to Donoso Cortés! Obviously ‘it is a question of choosing between the dictatorship that comes from below and the dictatorship that comes from above. I choose the one that comes from above, because it comes from cleaner, more serene regions. It is a question, finally, of choosing between the dagger and the sabre. I choose the dictatorship of the sabre, because it is nobler.’ (Bravo! Bravo!) An interest in the history of Spain has other useful reference points, such as the expulsion of the Jews under the Catholic Monarchs.

  Such is the curious circle drawn by history. ‘Decisionism’ and a love of tyranny according to Schmitt, the demiurge who inspired Franco’s jurists to turn their illegitimate new regime into a ‘creatio a Deo’ (‘Franco, Caudillo of Spain by the grace of God’), were themselves inspired by a nineteenth-century Spanish reactionary’s crazy ideology. Apart from shared ideals, here he finds the one quality that should characterise a Führer, Duce or Caudillo: ‘ferocity of speech’. Although he was a liberal in his youth, Donoso’s attacks on liberalism are expressed with extreme ferocity, which leads him to describe dictatorship as the form of government that corresponds to the divine, natural law.

  There is one feature of political liberalism that is the focus of all his contempt and revulsion. Liberalism is . . . frivolous. Frivolous! My God! This is a mark left by Donoso on Schmitt, which the latter emphasises early on in his criticism of the liberal system and parliamentary democracies. Frivolity. This is the terrible sin, like relativism in religion, according to Syllabus. In 1934, a hybrid of Donoso and Schmitt, Eugenio Montes, first intellectual figurehead opposed to the Republic and then thurible for Franco’s dictatorship, published his ‘Speech to Spanish Catholicism’, much vaunted by the right, in which he makes it clear there are to be no concessions regarding the form of government: ‘All relativism is anti-Catholic per se. Turning relativity into an ideal norm or code of conduct is like yielding your soul to the devil.’ Why does absolutism direct all its anger towards the scatterbrained idea of frivolity, making it the worst possible insult? Liberal ‘frivolity’ would have politics as a neutral field in an attempt to avoid confrontation. But ‘serious’ politics for the Donosos of yesterday and today is precisely that: confrontation with the enemy. And if there is no enemy, you just have to wait. One will turn up.

  ‘It is a significant coincidence that a genuine interest in research has always led me to Spain,’ says Don Carlos on 21 March 1962 before Franco’s elites. And of course he talks about the war, ‘In this almost providential coincidence, I see further proof that Spain’s war of national liberation is a touchstone.’ They understand each other. But such recognition was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1952, Arbor, a magazine dependent on the Council for Scientific Research and an important means of expression for Francoist intellectuals, published the essay ‘Carl Schmitt in Compostela’ written by Álvaro D’Ors, a leading member of Opus Dei and a professor in the Faculty of Law in Santiago. Which is where, in 1960, Porto y Cía published a Spanish version of Ex Captivitate Salus, a book that was well received, having been translated by his only daughter, Anima, married to a Professor of the History of Law, Alfonso Otero, whom she met in Germany.

  This Spanish edition includes an interesting preface Schmitt wrote in Casalonga, a villa on the outskirts of Santiago, in the summer of 1958. Thirteen years after the collapse of the Third Reich, there is in this preface not a hint of regret, not a single allusion to the horrors of the war and the policy of racial extermination known as the Holocaust. The only concentration camp he mentions is the one where he was briefly interned after the war, the only lament is his denunciation of the criminalisation of defeated Germany. At the start of the 1960s, on Compostelan evenings, Carl Schmitt, who was always so critical of American democracy, begins to express unusual interest in a politician by the name of Barry Goldwater, a past collaborator of McCarthy in his so-called ‘witch hunt’ and current senator for Arizona. ‘Watch Goldwater,’ Don Carlos tells his Spanish friends. ‘Goldwater represents an ultra-conservatism that wants to conquer the future.’

  Let us go back to Madrid and 1 Marina Española Square in 1962. Manuel Fraga Iribarne praises Carl Schmitt’s way of thinking, ‘more relevant today than ever’, and sums it up perfectly, ‘Politics as a decision, the return of personalised power, an anti-formalist understanding of the Constitution, a superseding of the concept of legality . . . are scaled heights we cannot turn back from.’ In his speech, the director of the Institute and master of ceremonies, who is himself a jurist, does nothing but defend the Kronjurist.

  ‘The law can be likened to a long-range cannon,’ wrote Manuel Fraga in the Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia in 1944. Now this jurist with a gunner’s vision, who is about to be named Minister of Information under the dictatorship, pins the decoration to the lapel of his ‘revered master’ Schmitt. Adds with emotion that this is ‘a high point of his career’. After the round of applause, Don Carlos, the man on the sidelines, takes centre stage. He is seventy-three, strong and in good health, and knows that the solemn use of language is going to make him grow in stature in front of a devoted audience. Emphasise the ‘power of presence’ his old friend and colleague Ernst Jünger attributed to him. He seems fully aware of what is happening. The unusual fact that somewhere in the world the Third Reich’s leading jurist is being fêted and awarded.

  With pleasure, he finally crosses the line he once drew for himself after the collapse of Nazism, that of taking shelter in the crypt of silence. In Spain, he finds his intellectual refuge and, to a large extent, living and triumphant, his model State. The stage on which to point to the defeat of parliamentary democracy. He is even able to take pleasure, when he meets cultivated reactionaries like D’Ors, in the rhetoric of an imaginary redoubt of the Holy Empire. Like his host, he emits not a word of self-criticism, not a hint of doubt or uncertainty. It is he who supplies his own best eulogy. Unlike his fiery predecessor, who is said sometimes to run out of control in his speeches, he talks slowly, enhances certain words to give way to that ‘power of presence’ described by Jünger. Makes use of liturgical gestures. ‘What was that he said?’ ‘A sacred feast.’ Yes, Carl Schmitt, Don Carlos, proclaims that this reunion with his Spanish friends is ‘a sacred feast in the winter of life’. At that moment, exactly at that moment, according to the testimony of the ecstatic Falangist writer Jesús Fueyo, ‘the lights went out’.

  The press highlighted the event. Described the tribute to Carl Schmitt in large letters. Various media reproduced an interview first published in Arriba ‘on account of its great interest’, a euphemism, no doubt, for what was known as ‘obligatory insertion’. ‘It is possible that all European countries will have to justify themselves before Spain,’ said Schmitt. But no medium, no newspaper, reported the blackout. Nobody explained that, when the hierarch
was pinning a badge to the chest of Don Carlos, the auditorium in the headquarters of the National Movement went dark. Completely dark.

  From A Dramatic History of Culture by Héctor Ríos, unpublished.

  The Compulsive Writer

  He filled his notebooks very quickly. He didn’t just like to write, he had a passion for calligraphy. Which later became a passion for stenography after he learnt the Martí method in Dr Montevideo’s version at Catia’s academy. He noted down his thoughts. Noted down what he was going to say. Both Chelo and the judge, for different reasons, were proud of this premature writer’s vocation. Chelo believed, rightly so, that it originated in those early lessons aimed at exorcising his fear of speech by means of graphic fluency and what she called ‘the hand’s sincerity’. She was pleased and deeply moved by the gifts of observation revealed by Gabriel’s writing, since she still thought of him as a child. The judge Samos had forgotten about the years of despair, that complicated period when Gabriel was so fragile, always on the verge of cracking, like a nativity figure. One day, he’d even used the word ‘defective’ a little carelessly. At a time when Gabriel’s stammer seemed to be getting worse. ‘Defective,’ he muttered, ‘a defective son’. In search of a word that sounded neutral, an ‘extenuating term’, he later claimed, he chose one that, even in a whisper, banged like a tin can.

  ‘You’re thinking about yourself,’ said Chelo. ‘You’re not thinking about him, you’re thinking about yourself.’

  There was a hint of horror underlying his wife’s expression. She started muttering as well, in a sad tone, as if she’d picked the word ‘defective’ up off the floor and was trying to repair it.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know very well what I mean. You’re thinking about what they’ll say. “Did you know the judge’s son has a stutter, Samos’ son can’t get his words out?” That’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Yes, that too. But most of all I’m thinking he can’t be a judge if he stutters. Had you thought about that? There are many things you can’t be in life if you’re tongue-tied. You can’t be a minister, or a general, or a bishop . . . No, you can’t. You can’t command an army, or say Mass, or pronounce sentence. You can’t do the most important jobs in life. Right? You can’t be a notary, secretary at the town hall, a policeman, a radio presenter. You can’t even sing the lottery. Or commentate a goal.’

  He suddenly felt well on this trip to the absurd. He was talking about getting tongue-tied while his was out enjoying a stroll down a shaded path.

  ‘You can’t even be a criminal. You can’t hold up a bank and trip over your tongue.’

  He stopped talking when he noticed Chelo’s distorted face. A Cubist face on the verge of splintering. He didn’t often see her cry, show her emotions. He’d thought about this, her phlegmatic qualities. A serenity whose immutability sometimes disturbed him. She seemed to contemplate the world in a frame, which allowed her to walk with curiosity, too much self-control. Her oriental calm in the Chinese Pavilion, where the only dramatic moments came from the grooves of the vinyl record, that Austrian soprano singing Pamina’s amorous lament, Ach, ich fühl’s, a sadness that forced its way into his study, made itself heard, stopped him doing anything else, despite the volume being turned down at its source, next to Chelo’s quiet painting. This at least was the impression she gave when she thought she was alone and could be observed without her realising, that sweet, hypnotic movement of the brush. Perhaps all the drama coming from the vinyl grooves was meant for him. A personal matter with the Austrian soprano and her high notes. He took more comfort in the low ones. Actually he knew his sense of anxiety was proportional to the attraction he felt for this music. Now that he thought about it, he really liked it, though he couldn’t have called it a passion. Aside from Chelo, he did know people who were passionate about opera. Something to do with the sea. There was a time great companies performed here on their way to America. Ships, however, no longer transported bel canto. What to do? A melancholy vision of things. It had been neglected. They had to agree that musical culture in the city had grown less. He’d mentioned this to various authorities. It’s not just a question of trusting in the use of force and propaganda. A cultural vacuum is dangerous, etc., etc. But of course idiots abound . . . He hadn’t said this, he’d kept it to himself. What he’d heard about the mayor. A spokesman for Friends of the Opera had gone to seek support for a festival and the mayor had replied with an intimidatory question, ‘How many friends are you? We’ll put you on a bus and . . . off to La Scala in Milan!’

  What to do?

  Chelo’s face goes back to normal, but is somehow different. Her gaze has the unthinking hardness of someone who’s managed to prevent a collapse, there is no collapse, and makes Ricardo decide to back down. Everything in him changes. He reveals the greatest discomfort, that of someone who’s lost control.

  ‘Excuse me. I was half joking. It doesn’t matter anyway.’

  ‘Of course it doesn’t. Stop thinking about what can or cannot be and think about what is. Stop seeing it as a curse.’

  Ricardo Samos was silent for a moment. The time it takes for a coin to be flipped in the air and land on the palm of the hand.

  ‘I see it like that. I can’t help it. As a curse. I want my son to be a judge one day. I’ve a right to want this. I want him to be the best. And yes, you’re right. Do you know what they’re saying? The look in their eyes when they ask, “How’s your son? Can it be helped? Did you know about the orator Demosthenes?” And they keep cracking jokes. “When the judge finally passed sentence, the defendant was already in the street.” And so on. The whole city cracking jokes.’

  ‘The whole city?’

  ‘Those who matter to us at least.’

  He’d been sincere. Often, in his lectures, he’d defended the concept of Dignitas non moritur. According to this traditional viewpoint, having dignity meant wielding and handing down power. He wasn’t going to discuss this now, the underlying coincidence between medieval political theology and his thought, a victor’s thought, which made this unwritten law applicable. The old idea that ‘dignity does not die’ and is inherited, a justification of privilege, ‘corporation by succession’. But no. This was not the time to explain to Chelo what he thought and felt, there was probably no point.

  ‘He may or may not become a judge,’ said Chelo, ‘but don’t talk to me about a curse ever again.’

  This time, Ricardo Samos took notice. No, he wouldn’t use that word again. Besides, Gabriel’s difficulty with speech soon entered a new phase. Of rapid improvement, it seemed.

  During a visit to Madrid, Grandpa Samos, who was then a high-ranking Navy legal officer, had tried to convince the judge that Gabriel’s problem was, in fact, the faltering expression of a sensitive and extremely gifted young boy. Ricardo didn’t pay much attention. He didn’t think his father an expert in such matters and, most of all, he couldn’t marry the idea of being extremely gifted with tripping over your tongue, being unable to express yourself, having such a terrible fear of words.

  But when he heard the same thing from others he held in high esteem, such as Gueldo the judge, Fasco the prosecutor, Professor Sulfe and even Father Munio, his old fears gave way to this new idea that sooner or later there would be a change in Gabriel when all his aptitude came to the fore.

  What worried Chelo, who’d assumed the task of seeking out and consulting specialists, was how little was known about speech impediments. The pedagogical vacuum. The lack of treatments. And, what shocked her more than anything, the little importance they were given compared to the suffering they caused those who experienced them.

  During this search that lasted years, she reached the conclusion that her idea of painting souvenirs on Gabriel’s hands and making him practise his handwriting and drawing hadn’t been so wide of the mark. It was also important he should enjoy words. She’d cried with laughter the day she arrived home and Gabriel came running up to her from the grandfather clock, shou
ting the formula for aspirin, ‘Acetylsalicylic acid!’

  Gabriel was getting better. He had periods of silence, when he withdrew into his shell, in a state of watchfulness, and appeared to be chewing over the whole of language.

  He liked to read, would write things on his own initiative and put all his effort into practising his speech. This was beyond doubt. This was the best sign. His marks at school were excellent. He could spend days in almost total silence. This way, he avoided being laughed at and made fun of. The teachers knew this and didn’t try to force him to talk. A few attempts had been successful. Others had ended in disaster. Gabriel stuck on a syllable for minutes. His face red. With an absent look.

  Until there was a sudden change. A miraculous U-turn. It was when he started writing compulsively. The same summer he asked to attend typing classes. He was amazed by the skill of a student a little older than him, who was dockside reporter for the evening Expreso. He could type very fast, without looking, using all his fingers. And, even more amazingly, he was learning shorthand. Gabriel also could take this step. Acquire a technique that allowed you to transcribe speech at a natural rhythm.

  ‘That’s magnificent, Gabriel,’ said Chelo. She was enthusiastic. ‘It’s a fantastic idea. Like drawing words.’

  ‘How was it you became friends?’ asked his father.

  In the docks. Stringer is always down in the docks. Everyone calls him that, Stringer. He notes down the names of ships, where they’re coming from, their next destination, the cargo on board. He sometimes conducts interviews. The other day, a ship arrived from the Great Sole, carrying a smaller boat inside, a sailing boat they’d found drifting without a crew. On board were the papers of a Dutchman who lived in the States. He was a photographer and artist.