"Barbarians Telescreens and Jazz: Reactionary uchronias in Modern Spain, 1870-1960"

8/16/2019 "Barbarians Telescreens and Jazz: Reactionary uchronias in Modern Spain, 1870-1960"

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Barbarians, telescreens, and jazz:

reactionary uchronias in Modern Spain, c. 1870-19601

1. Introduction

This article is a preliminary exploration of a large and relatively unknown sample of

reactionary uchronias –works of fiction that imagine future revolutionary societies in

dystopian terms2 – published in Spain between the 1870s and the 1950s. Gregory Claeys

has found the origins of this distinctively modern literary subgenre –which, as we will

see, overlaps with many other genres– in what he calls the “second dystopian turn” of

the late nineteenth century, born as a reaction against the promises of science and

socialism.3 However, French historians have described the emergence in France in the

mid-nineteenth century of an anti-utopian genre that anticipates the classic novels

written by Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell in the first half of the twentieth century.4

Émile Souvestre’s novel Le Monde tel qu’il sera (1846), the story of a young couple’s

time-travel to a mechanical and utilitarian “Republic of United Interests” set in the year

3000, stands as a likely forerunner of a genre that would flourish decades later as a

reaction to socialist utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888).

Similarly, Matthew Beaumont has argued that British “cacotopian” literature was born

out the fear of contagion aroused by the Paris Commune of 1871 among the British

bourgeoisie.5 In Spain, works of this kind also appeared in the 1870s, coinciding, as we

shall see, with the impact of the Commune and the First International in the country.

Anti-revolutionary uchronias are seldom mentioned in histories of utopian literature;

with few exceptions, historians have either neglected them or emphasized their poor

artistic quality.6 Spanish specialists such as José-Carlos Mainer and José Luis Calvo

Carilla have also stressed the poor quality and vulgar didacticism of Spanish “scientificfantasy” in the period under study.7 Contrary to these views, I intend to argue that these

works not only provide a precious insight into the mentality of a large section of

Spanish society in the transition to modernity, but also illuminate the formative process

of the modern dystopia. Just as socialism (in a broad sense) was the main source of

utopian thought between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, anti-

socialism (in the same broad sense) was the foremost inspiration of the anti-utopian

imagination in the same period.8

The case of Spain is interesting due to the abundanceand variety of such works, long after the turn of the century, and the evidence of cultural


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transfer both into and –less often– from Spain. As Geraldine Lawless has pointed out,

Spanish authors “did not merely imitate their European neighbors…, they created

original works, visualizing the future in genuinely significant and innovative ways.”9

The analysis is based on a sample of some 40 works written between the 1870s and

the 1950s, but for the most part between the 1890s and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil

War in 1936. This chronology corresponds to the heyday of revolutionary ideologies

and hence to that of revolutionary utopian literature in Spain: anarchist uchronias such

as Ricardo Mella’s Nueva utopía (“New utopia”, 1889) and Alfonso Martínez Rizo’s

1945: el advenimiento del comunismo libertario (“The coming of libertarian

communism”, 1932) envisioned future libertarian societies in all realms, from

agriculture to sex life.10 But the rise of anti-utopianism also coincided with profound

changes in Spanish society: the spread of industrialization, urbanization and modernity,

and a Silver Age of culture marked by the spread of progressive ideas about class,

religion and gender. The uchronias studied here can only be understood in the context of

the passionate and often bitter debates raised by these transformations.

2. The politics of the future

Spanish uchronias invite the politico-ideological reading they often receive for

various reasons. The most obvious is their political subject matter: they focused on the

actors, movements and ideas that dominated the politics of their age, both in Spain and

abroad, and reflected –albeit in a biased way– the course of Spanish politics during this

long period. Some had real-life characters and adopted the form of a fictional –if

satirical– political chronicle. This is the case of the failed Republic imagined by Pío

Baroja in 1903, whose ending emphasized the plausibility of the events described, and

also of the Republic imagined by Domingo Ciricí and José Arrufat in their “politicalfantasy” La República española del año 19… (“The Spanish Republic of the year 19…,

1911), whose protagonists were well-known contemporary left-wing leaders such as

Alejandro Lerroux, Pablo Iglesias and Benito Pérez Galdós.11 In other texts, the

characters were fictitious but belonged to existing political movements; indeed, these

actors –and the revolutionary menace they implied– changed according to the actual

evolution of the Spanish workers’ movement. Both Baroja and Ciricí-Arrufat drew on

the memory of the First Republic of 1873 that prevailed during the Bourbon Restoration(1875-1923), that has been summarized as “disorder, separatism, atheism, lack of


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authority, utopia, coarseness, socialism”.12 Salvio Valentí’s Del éxodo al paraíso

(“From exodus to paradise”, 1933), in contrast, fed on the archetype of the syndicalist –

the amoral if skillful anarchist agitator, an enemy of society and capable of the worst

crimes– that provoked an intense red scare in the years following the Russian

Revolution.13 In the interwar period, all these images merged into that of the

communist, a worldwide conspirator that combined the features of the “new barbarian”

with Asian stereotypes.14 Ramón Pérez de Ayala’s La revolución sentimental (“The

sentimental revolution”, 1929), a re-edition of his Sentimental Club (1909), renamed the

democratic World State of the first version as the “Universal Communist Republic”.15

Through these stereotypes borrowed from contemporary social discourse,

uchronias transmitted an explicit counter-revolutionary message. As the Spanish liberal

and conservative press had done since the 1840s, they emphasized the identification of

socialism, communism and anarchism, their utopian (chimerical) character and the

mortal threat they posed to Spanish society.16 This standard imagery –imported from

France– had already been expressed in 1856 by Joan Mañé y Flaquer, a liberal and

Catholic journalist, in his preface to the first Spanish edition of Alfred Sudre’s Histoire

du communisme (1848).17 The author’s description of socialists as “new vandals”,

bearers of a French idea, “destroyer of the familiar and social bonds, contrary to the

eternal principles of religion and morality”, reflects an imagery of revolution as an anti-

social force, the exact opposite of all “civilized” values, that would persist with few

changes until the Civil War, just as his explanation of the “social ills” as a result of “the

fall of the first man”, a “fault of our nature” which could only be remedied by the

resignation of the poor and the charity of the wealthy.

In short, Spanish uchronias appear as literary expressions of the “rhetoric of

reaction” that, according to Albert Hirschman, has condemned projects for social

change, from the French Revolution to the present, on account of their “perversity”,“futility” and “jeopardy”.18 Indeed most of them criticized revolutionary ideas either for

their impossibility, or for the disastrous consequences that may follow from their

realization, or for both reasons. Anti-utopians agreed on interpreting revolutions as

bloody “farces”, moments of anarchy and terror where power simply changed hands

from the traditional elites to ambitious and hypocritical demagogues who were ready to

betray their ideals as soon as they got power.19

These topoi were most often associated with the defense of the status quo – private property, social hierarchies and traditional moral values–, even if in Spain, as


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elsewhere, reaction was a broad, plural and often contradictory field.20 The anti-utopian

camp was composed for the most part of conservative authors, such as the ex-prime

minister Juan Bravo Murillo, Ricardo León and Agustín de Foxá, but it also included

liberals such as Nilo María Fabra and Ramón Pérez de Ayala and even moderate

Republicans such as the ex prime minister Emilio Castelar, the author of the preface of

the second edition of Fabra’s El problema social (“The social problem”, 1892).21 The

protagonist of León’s Bajo el yugo de los bárbaros (“Under the yoke of barbarians”,

1932) praised such fathers of Spanish traditionalism as Juan Donoso Cortés, Marcelino

Menéndez Pelayo and Jaime Balmes and stood for “the deep, Catholic and perennial

Spain”.22 Fabra, instead, endorsed a liberal and progressive utopia as the key to the

regeneration of Spain: in a short story published in 1885 he defended “individual

freedom and the entrepreneurial spirit, inexhaustible sources of wealth and progress.”23

Other texts advocated a middle way between capitalism and socialism, along the lines

of Catholic social doctrine since Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). In

Carmen San Sebastián’s pastoral utopia Tiempos nuevos (“New Times”, 1933), a

patriarchal family of landholders dissuaded peasants from revolution through welfare

measures such as a School of Agriculture, an agricultural lending bank and a “Chair of

Love and Ethics”, and established a new “communism” sanctified by religion.24

With few exceptions, however, Spanish anti-utopians agreed on blaming

revolutionary ideas on the larger changes brought by modernity. Along with political

radicalism, they condemned materialism, utilitarianism, science, technology and

industry as opposed to human nature, in line with British and French anti-utopias (and

many utopias) since the late nineteenth century.25 In the words of Manuel Pérez

Ledesma, they expressed “a moral or cultural fear” and considered workers as “a threat

for the established moral and social rules, and not only nor mainly for political

structures.”26 Revolutions attacked the foundations of society and civilization, propertyand the family, and hence resulted in moral corruption. Cacotopian societies were

pantheist, such as that of Ayala’s Sentimental Club, or completely irreligious, such as

that of Luis Antón del Olmet’s La verdad en la ilusión (“Truth in illusion”, 1913),

where sexual relations were completely rationalized and reproduction controlled

through eugenic techniques.27 In Miguel Ángel Calvo Rosello’s short story “Un país

extraño” (“A strange country”, 1919), the State of the “Free Country” eliminated weak

and handicapped people and both the family and love had been abandoned.28

Revolution and modern popular culture became synonymous in Pascual Santacruz’s Los


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desengaños de un comunista (“A communist’s disillusions”, 1925), where young

barbarians danced “to the deafening tune of a jazz-band, the music of the savages of

modern civilization”.29 The protagonist of León’s Bajo el yugo de los bárbaros also

condemned jazz, free love, nudism, eugenics, euthanasia, sterilization, abortion, social

sciences, physical education, coeducation and, more generally, the corruption of

workers by “those decadent and infertile metropolis, hostile to God, enemies of

Nature… in which today… civilization rots and dissolves in barbaric materialism.”30

Another typical target of this literature was the subversion of traditional gender

roles, a subject of intense social controversy in interwar Spain.31 The idea of a

matriarchal society was indeed the central topic of the best Spanish fantastic novels of

the interwar period: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s El paraíso de las mujeres (“The paradise

of women”, 1922), Luis Araquistáin’s El archipiélago maravilloso (“The wonderful

archipelago”, 1923) and Salvador de Madariaga’s La jirafa sagrada (“The sacred

giraffe”, 1925). All three were written in the British satirical tradition, while drawing on

topoi already used by Aristophanes, and, even if they did not condemn feminism as

such –the three authors were progressive Republicans–, they do invite an anti-utopian

reading. In Blasco’s novel, written for Hollywood and translated into six languages, the

women of Lilliput had seized power after a “great revolution” and established a feminist

“United States of Happiness”, reducing men to serfdom as members of an inferior

caste.32 The topic plays a less prominent but nonetheless important role in some

reactionary uchronias. The decadent Eloi society of Carlos Mendizábal’s Elois y

Morlocks (“Elois and Morlocks”, 1909) was strictly matriarchal, and the social mobility

of men depended on their sexual prowess in “cities of pleasure”. 33 In León’s

“Proletarian Iberian Republic”, as well as in Valentí’s Ardiaka, men had become

effeminate and women adopted a masculine and uninhibited sexual behavior.34 As has

been observed with regard to Tomás Borrás’ modernist short novel El poder del pensamiento (“The power of thought”, 1928), in Spanish interwar literature liberated

women were often the archetypal threat to traditional moral values.35

Thus, the controversy against revolution often ended up in a wholesale attack on

modernity itself. This is evident in Pérez de Ayala’s Sentimental Club (1909), where a

group of dissenters agreed to overthrow a mechanical and collectivist society under the

banner of a “sentimental revolution”; and in Miguel de Unamuno’s short story

“Mecanópolis” (“Mechanopolis”, 1913), which was explicitly inspired by SamuelButler’s Erewhon (1872) and described the anguish of the protagonist upon his arrival


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to a completely automatized and dehumanized society.36 The predominant mood was a

stark refusal of modernity and mechanism and a longing for a pre-industrial, bucolic

and traditionalist counter-utopia.37 The Nationalist-Catholic reaction of the 1930s was

based on nostalgia for the lost Empire: Leon’s protagonist recalled “the golden centuries

in which God lived on this land; when the Spanish ships stirred in these seas, waving

the banners of the Cross, those of the kings of Castile and Aragon…”38 However, this

fantasy coexisted with the dread, expressed by Agustín de Foxá in 1935, of the waning

of an aristocratic and romantic epoch represented by “the liberal, romantic and

individualist cicada, the deer, the swan, the butterfly with her low-cut nightgown, the

nightingale singing opera on a branch...”39 This sinister “prophecy” had been fulfilled

by 1952, when Foxá compared capitalism and socialism as different paths to a

mechanical, collectivist and inhuman modernity. Cinema, radio, soccer, propaganda,

blocks of flats, public parks and American standardized clothes announced that “The

State will soon be our God. We are already measured and weighted by it, with no

possible escape.”40

However, these expressions of romantic cultural despair were often intended as a

spur to action. The first Spanish cacotopias, like their British counterparts, had an

explicit propagandist goal, aimed either at warning the working classes against the

pernicious influence of revolutionary doctrines –such as the anonymous pamphlet

Historia de Andresillo ó el comunismo visto por dentro (“Story of Andresillo or

communism from within”, 1872), that ended exhorting its reader to “calm down your

spirit, upset by so much preaching” and “endear yourself with your good behavior to

those rich people that you so unjustly hate...” 41; or at persuading the bourgeoisie of the

need for “defense against the common class enemy” (Bravo Murillo’s “La Internacional

y las españolas” explicitly called on Spanish women to “take an active part in the

crusade” that had been launched on behalf of social order and against the ideas of theWorkers’ International.42 The same intention may be found in later works such as the

Spanish translation of Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future, edited by the liberal

politician Conde de San Bernardo and freely distributed in working-class centers in

1896.43 Uchronias worked as a pre-emptive response to an eventual revolutionary

threat, a self-defeating –yet wholly rational– jeremiad. 44 In the same way as the

prophets of the Old Testament, their authors presented the picture of hell on Earth in

order to persuade sinners to mend their ways before it was too late.45

The Nationalist movement that destroyed the Second Republic in 1936-1939 was, among other things,


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the political expression of the anti-utopians’ Kulturkampf against revolution and

modernity.

3. The poetics of social nightmares

Despite their political and moral intent, these texts were conceived as fiction, most

often as novels or short stories; Pérez de Ayala’s Sentimental Club and Foxá’s Otoño de

3006 (“Autumn of 3006”, 1954) were the only dramas.46 Both Sentimental Club and its

remake La revolución sentimental were first issued in cheap pulp fiction collections,

which in Spain enjoyed massive commercial success while maintaining a high average

quality.47 Literary elaboration was often, as we have seen, a pretext for the presentation

of arguments in a didactic and propagandistic manner. However, as the genre developed

and the influence of foreign fantastic literature spread in Spain since the turn of the

century, authors started to produce complex and ingenious plots which effectively

conveyed their messages. The influence of H.G. Wells’s scientific romances is

especially evident in the works of the British-educated Pérez de Ayala and in Carlos

Mendizábal’s Elois y Morlocks (1909), a sequel to The Time Machine that reunited the

bourgeois Eloi and the proletarian Morlocks into a hybrid race, the Moreloi, who

restored social peace under the banner of religion.48

As uchronias, the modern version of the utopia, these works belong to the futuristic

genre that in nineteenth century Spain produced original works such as Antonio Flores’

Ayer, hoy y mañana (“Yesterday, today and tomorrow”, 1863) and Enrique Gaspar’s El

anacronópete (“The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey”, 1887).49 Most were set in

an uncertain future era but some gave specific dates, ranging from 1908 (Baroja) to

802.701 (Mendizábal, imitating Wells). The most common time-travel mechanism was

the dream (more often, the nightmare), a classic resource of uchronias that was used inthe works of Bravo Murillo, Fabra, Olmet and León.50 Dreams helped to enhance

suspense by beginning in medias res and creating a fantastic atmosphere: the

protagonist of Bajo el yugo de los bárbaros travelled around a proletarian Spain on “a

strange and crepuscular day that may be just as well at the dawn than at the dying

moments of the world.”51 A slight variation was the loss of consciousness due to an

accident, as in Calvo Roselló’s “Un país extraño”, or to a Frankenstein-like scientific

experiment, as in Valentí’s Del éxodo al paraíso, that began at the initial moment of a


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great revolution and moved forward to the moment when the protagonist awoke after

sleeping for twenty years.52

Topographies tended to be more conventional, most stories taking place in local

settings –Spain, and most often Madrid–, even if these were often presented as

representative of global processes. Del éxodo al paraíso took place in an unknown

industrial city (Drena) resembling Barcelona, stronghold of Spanish anarcho-

syndicalism in the early twentieth century. Inversely, the rural north served as a pastoral

utopia in San Sebastian’s Tiempos nuevos (1933), set in a “delightful island resembling

an autonomous region lost on the confines of a powerful State”.53 The colony of

deported anarchists in Fabra’s “La locura del anarquismo” (1895) was set in the

Caroline Islands (a Spanish colony at the time), whereas Julio Bravo’s novel El tratado

de Heligoland (“The treaty of Heligoland”, 1924) took place in an imaginary desert

island in the North Sea.54 Nicolas Tassin’s La catástrofe (“The catastrophe”, 1924) was

set in Paris, although the action affected the whole world.55 The plot of Enrique Sánchez

Rubio’s Los últimos capítulos de la historia (“The last chapters of History”, 1930) was

centered on biblical Palestine.56 However, Spain played a leading role in most stories: it

was the capital of Catholic counter-revolution in Los últimos capítulos de la historia,

whereas in Bajo el yugo de los bárbaros it symbolized –along with Rome– “the eternal

values of the spirit”.57 Few authors dared to imagine completely abstract settings, as did

Pérez de Ayala in Sentimental Club.58

Most works in the sample fit into the “dystopian form” described by Tom

Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini, “built around the construction of a narrative of the

hegemonic order and a counter-narrative of resistance” that exemplifies the moral of the

story and captures the reader’s attention.59 Revolutionary societies adopted two

different albeit related forms. Early cacotopian regimes were typically anarchic and

violent, ruling by coercion rather than by consent. After the turn of the century,however, they became increasingly orderly, technocratic and totalitarian, controlling the

private life and the thoughts of its citizens. The Earth described in Sentimental Club was

ruled by an impersonal “Directory” that practiced constant propaganda and had erased

books, music and all memories of the past; citizens had numbers instead of names, they

all dressed in identical grey clothes and adored a “Great fetish”.60 Similarly, La verdad

en la ilusión described “a grey, uniform, pigeonholed crowd… devoid of heart, of

passions, of sex.”61

The communist “Ruling council” of “Un país extraño” monitored itscitizens through telephonoscopes and indoctrinated them as constantly as Oceania’s


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leaders in Orwell’s 1984. The gradual replacement of the barbarian with the totalitarian

paradigm reflects an evolution in the concept of revolution towards the Fordist World

State of Brave new world (1932).

Behind these changes in content descriptions of collectivist societies reflect

continuity in the use of some basic metaphors, such as the colour grey and an animal

imagery reminiscent of classic science-fiction. León dehumanized his “new barbarians”

by comparing them to “ants’ nests” and “swarms”62. Foxá used the descriptions of the

life of termites made by Maurice Maeterlinck as a metaphor of collectivism and modern

civilization as a whole in various texts written between 1935 and 1958, and concluded:

“The antennae were the only things that kept us from physically resembling insects.

Thanks to radio and TV, now we have got them.” 63 His brother Jaime de Foxá carried

the trope even further in his novel Marea verde (“Green tide”, 1951), by imagining the

discovery of a chlorophyll-like substance that allowed men to feed only on sunlight –

“the most complete of communisms–” and turned them into vegetables, deprived of

energy, will and passions.64

Like British contemporary cacotopias and later science fiction, many texts

emphasize the protagonists’ estrangement in the face of revolution.65 The female

protagonist of “La Internacional y las españolas” described the triumph of the Workers’

International in Madrid as a radical transformation of social reality: “everything was

new, subject to new laws or new regulations, new uses and a new way of being.” 66 The

revolutionary cities that appear in this and other uchronias correspond to the

contemporary image of Barcelona as a “bourgeois dystopia… a city besieged by an

army of proletarian barbarians.”67 As a realization of George Sorel’s myth of the

general strike, shops and churches were closed, trade interrupted, the overall rhythm of

life disjointed and paralysed. The metamorphosis of physical reality was stressed by the

erasing of history and a new temporality: the protagonist of Del éxodo al paraíso foundhimself in a completely transformed city, divided in sectors with revolutionary names,

and where flags and posters exhibited the leaders of the revolution and proclaimed the

“Year XIX of the Libertarian Revolution”.68 In Marea verde, the distribution of

chlorophyll to the people of Madrid resulted in “the radical transformation of the city”;

the protagonist and his fiancée felt “as if [they] had suddenly arrived to another planet.”

69 Cacotopian societies were explored, and sometimes challenged, by a variety of

protagonists. The narrator was often a man of the people, a disenchanted worker like the


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protagonist of Richter’s Sozialdemokratische Zukunftsbilder , whose change of mind

reflected the moral lesson of the text. Historia de Andresillo (1872) was narrated by a

poor, illiterate man from Estremadura, led by ignorance, irreligion and class hatred into

the Republican-socialist movement, but ultimately redeemed by a loving and pious wife

and the chaos brought about by a revolution in which “everyone made demands and no

one wanted to give.”70 Similarly, in Fabra’s “El problema social” a series of letters

written by a socialist revolutionary to a friend described the degeneration of revolution

into anarchy and the narrator’s disillusionment with socialism.71 The anarchist

protagonist in Ángeles Vicente’s “Cuento absurdo” (“Absurd tale”, 1908) likewise

changed his mind when he saw that the libertarian society he wanted to build on the

ruins of the destroyed bourgeois world was torn apart by conflicts among his followers,

concluding that “selfishness, cruelty, anger, envy, hatred, bestial instincts, are fatally

innate in human nature.”72

This moral development was missing when the protagonist was an archetypal

bourgeois, such as the lady who tearfully regretted the loss of her properties and her

maid in “La Internacional y las españolas”; or the self-satisfied Spanish rentier of La

verdad en la ilusión. Others chose Christian heroes, such as the young student Leucipo

in Los últimos capítulos de la historia, the Ángel West of Marea verde or the Alfonso

de Cepeda of Bajo el yugo de los bárbaros, a Castilian and Catholic gentleman

modelled on El Greco’s Knight.73 Resistance was often reminiscent of sacred history,

and dystopian rebels compared with Christian martyrs; a missionary in Bajo el yugo de

los bárbaros told Cepeda: “We return to the iron age of Christianity…” 74 Only a few

authors created modern dystopian rebels, everyman figures such as the Zeus of

Sentimental Club or the equally sentimental protagonist of “Un país extraño”, who

challenged the “Free country” by falling in love with a young native (the lovers’ plan to

flee the country was thwarted by the communist leaders who, in a dramatic final scenereminiscent of 1984, sentenced her to death and sent him back to his world).75

With exceptions such as the aforementioned novel, uchronias usually had happy

endings. Most revolutions ended up in chaos, the reaction of the bourgeoisie and the

restoration of the old order, amidst the celebration of the people. 76 Other texts, such as

Sentimental Club and La República española del año 19… had an open ending,

although the “sentimental revolution” plotted by Zeus and his followers was in itself

optimistic, as was the rebellion promoted by Gustavo Vinar, the energetic protagonist of Del éxodo al paraíso. The struggle between Satanic communism and Catholic reaction


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recounted in Juan José Valverde’s La bestia del apocalipsis (“The Beast of

Apocalypse”, 1935) ended up, predictably, in the coming of Jesus Christ and the Last

Judgment.77 At the end of Marea verde the young protagonist travelled North to join the

resistance against “green communism”, a bunch of heroes who, unlike those of the

medieval Reconquista, fought only with moral conviction “for the old spirit, love and

the lost norms.”78

Spanish reactionary uchronias appear thus as composite genre containing both

anti-utopian and dystopian elements. On a basic level, they were satires, parodically

inverting the traditional utopian model in order to emphasize its absurdity.79 Olmet’s La

verdad en la ilusión even borrowed the structure of the utopia, a guided tour through an

“ultra-scientific” society in the twenty-fourth century. Julio Bravo’s El tratado de

Heligoland (1924) inverted the classic plot of a group of refined and idealistic men who

decided to settle on a desert island in the North Sea and created a Phalansterian

community aimed at promoting universal peace, but where greed came to the surface

and the experiment ended in disaster.80 Even if most works were anti-utopian in both

form and message, some do share some of the features traditionally associated with

modern dystopias. Sentimental Club has been considered “one of the clearest precedents

of the modern dystopian mode” and may have been read and appreciated by Aldous

Huxley.81 Its collectivist and mechanical society clearly resembles that of British proto-

dystopias like Jerome K. Jerome’s “The New Utopia” (1890) and E.M. Forster’s “The

Machine Stops” (also published in 1909).82 However, the tone of this “burlesque

rigmarole” was playful, maybe because the author did not wish to shock his readers

with a map of hell that did not correspond to their experience.83 Sentimental Club, and

similar texts such as Calvo Rosello’s “Un país extraño”, illustrate the subtle line that

separates anti-utopias from dystopias.

Nevertheless, any attempt at drawing neat distinctions would ignore the constantoverlaps and hybridizations in this literature.84 In Spain, as elsewhere, anti-utopias

developed in a common ground composed of religious, popular and scientific

traditions.85 Historia de Andresillo was an obvious parable in the style of traditional

popular literature and the picaresque novel. In La verdad en la ilusión, anti-utopian

ideology was intertwined with fantastic descriptions of a twenty-fourth century global

society, where airplanes traveled across continents in half an hour, people fed

themselves on pills and had lost their teeth and their intestines, despite being intellectualsupermen, they emitted powerful electric rays and produced their own water. In “Un


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país extraño” (1919), men were undressed by machines and could see and talk to each

other thorough telephonoscopes that, like 1984’s telescreens, allowed the State to

constantly supervise its citizens’ slightest actions and words. Tasin’s La catástrofe,

obviously inspired in Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), described the invasion of

the Earth by extra-terrestrial monsters (“ zootauros”) and the victorious struggle of an

underground progressive French Republic against these creatures and domestic

subversion by separatist and anarchist movements.86

Other anti-utopias explored the secularized apocalyptic genre previously

cultivated by notable Spanish authors such as Leopoldo Alas Clarín and José Martínez

Ruiz Azorín.87 Two examples of apocalyptic literature with elements of science fiction

are Vicente’s Cuento absurdo (1908), describing the destruction of humanity by the

anarchist scientist Guillermo Arides, and Blanco Belmonte’s “El ocaso de la

humanidad” (1918), that described the gradual killing of mankind by a machine called

ananké (“necessity” or “fate” in ancient Greek).88 Significantly, apocalyptic imagery

reached its zenith in the years leading up to the Civil War: Sánchez Rubio’s Los últimos

capítulos de la historia, a long “historico-philosophical and prophetic fantasy”,

described a futuristic world of air trains, solar panels and Morse code radiograms and

the persecution of Christians by the “great revolution” which preceded an imprecise end

of humanity according to the prophecies of the Apocalypse. 89 Bajo el yugo de los

bárbaros also contained explicitly apocalyptic scenes that prefigure those of José María

Pemán’s epic Poema de la bestia y el ángel (“Poem of the Beast and the Angel”,

1938).90

Concluding remarks

On a general level, this preliminary study seems to confirm that literature is alwaysrooted in social attitudes and the debates of its age, and the need for a historical

approach to utopian literature as an arena of political, social and conceptual conflict.91

Reactionary uchronias are particularly valuable sources to understand the attitudes and

emotions of a large section of Spanish society between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-

twentieth century, the core of Koselleck’s Neuzeit : their sense of the acceleration of

history and their fear of the possibility of a radical revolution and, more broadly, of

modern times.92

Its dystopian form proved especially successful as a means ofexpression of ideologies and mentalities, and in particular of reaction: indeed, the


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scarcity of progressive examples of the genre in the same period is remarkable.93

Uchronias confirm Karl Mannheim’s observations on the resilience of conservatism in

the modern world, its ability to imagine a “counter-utopia which serves as a means of

self-orientation and defense” against progressive and revolutionary utopias.94

Secondly, the study shows the remarkable spread of the dystopian form in the

Western world since the late nineteenth century and the need for further comparative

analyses that integrate the traditions of “semi-peripheral countries” into the general –

and overwhelmingly Anglo-American– narrative on the history of utopianism.95

Spanish reactionary uchronias are in some ways typical examples of Western

speculative literature, but they have also peculiar features due to the Spanish Sonderweg

in the twentieth century. As we have seen, the rebellion they represented was directed

against collectivism and modernity as a whole, but religion played a much larger role

both in the plot and in the identity of protagonists. Besides, this literature flourished in

the first three decades of the twentieth century, when social instability was most intense,

and virtually stopped during the Civil War, to be replaced by a massive output of

testimonial accounts of the Red terror prevailing in Republican Spain.96 Indeed the

memory of the Spanish conflict replaced uchronias in the dystopian imagination during

Francoism –when León’s 1932 novel was re-edited with the subtitle Jornadas de la

Revolución Española (“Days of the Spanish Revolution”)– and, according to some

authors, remains very much alive in present day Spain.97

The virtual disappearance of the dystopian subgenre after the 1950s can also be

interpreted as a result of its own success: in Spain, even more than elsewhere in the

West, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the triumph of social and

economic modernity, but also the decline of revolutionary and utopian thinking. Since

the demise of the Soviet Union, in particular, there is no need for the pre-emptive

prophecies that flourished when communism seemed like a plausible threat. Even if therise of the left-wing populist party Podemos and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism

have fueled some dystopian speculation in recent years, conservative-minded Spaniards

seem to be more comfortable with the current social trends than were their great

grandfathers with barbarians, telescreens and jazz.98


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NOTES

1 This work has been undertaken within the framework of HAR2012-32713 project as part of the NationalR & D Plan in Spain. Preprint of the article published in Utopian Studies, Vol. 26, Nº. 2, 2015, pp. 383-400: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.26.2.03832

The term is here used as a synonym for futuristic dystopias, and not in the original sense of alternatehistory: see Paul Alkon, Origins of futuristic fiction (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2010), 115-57.3 Gregory Claeys, “The origins of dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell”, in The Cambridge Companion toUtopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 135-153.4 Marc Angenot, “The emergence of the anti-utopian genre in France: Souvestre, Giraudeau, Robida, etal.”, Science Fiction Studies 2 (1985), 129-135.5 Matthew Beaumont, “Cacotopianism, The Paris Commune and England’s anti-communist imaginary,1871-1900”, ELH 2 (Summer 2006), 465-487.6 Chad Walsh, From utopia to nightmare (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 75; Raymond Trousson, Historia de la literatura utópica: viajes a países inexistentes (Barcelona: Península, 1995), 283-85.7 José Carlos Mainer, “Una paráfrasis de H.G. Wells en 1909 y algunas notas sobre la fantasía científicaen España”, in La recepción del texto literario, ed. Jean-Pierre Etienvre (Zaragoza: Universidad deZaragoza, 1988), 145-76; José Luis Calvo Carilla, El sueño sostenible. Estudios sobre la utopía literaria

en España (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2008), 289.8 Krishan Kumar, Utopia and anti-utopia in modern times (Oxford-New York: Blackwell, 1987), 49.9 Geraldine Lawless, “Unknown Futures: Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction in Spain”, SFS 2 (July

2011), 253. The best synthesis in English is Mariano Martín Rodríguez, “Science Fiction as MainstreamLiterature: The Spanish Scientific Romance and its Reception Before the 1936 Spanish Civil War”, Zanzalá 1 (2011), accessed 12 February 2015, ISSN 2236-8191.10 These and similar texts are collected in Utopías libertarias españolas siglos XIX y XX , eds. Luis GómezTovar and Javier Paniagua. (Madrid: Tuero, 1991), vol. II.11 Pío Baroja, “La República del año 8 y la intervención del año 12”, Alma española 7 (December 20,1903); Domingo Ciricí Ventalló and José Arrufat Mestres, La República española del año 191…: fantasía política (Madrid, 1911).12 José María Jover Zamora, Realidad y mito de la Primera República (Madrid: Espasa, 1991), 91.13 Fernando del Rey, “El empresario, el sindicalista y el miedo”, in Cultura y movilización en la España

contemporánea, eds. Rafael Cruz and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (Madrid: Alianza, 1997), 235-72.14 Rafael Cruz, “¡Luzbel vuelve al mundo!: Las imágenes de la Rusia soviética y la acción colectiva enEspaña”, in Cultura y movilización…, 273-303.15 Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Sentimental Club (Madrid, 1909) and La revolución sentimental (Madrid,1929), 31.16 María Antonia Fernández, “Socialismo” and “Comunismo”, and Juan Francisco Fuentes, “Utopía”, in Diccionario político y social del siglo XIX español, eds. Javier Fernández Sebastián and Juan FranciscoFuentes (Madrid Alianza, 2008), 653-658, 179-183 and 685-688.17 Joan Mañé y Flaquer, prologue to Alfredo Sudre, Historia del comunismo, o refutación histórica de lasutopías socialistas, 2nd edition, (Barcelona, 1860), iii-xxii.18 Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: perversity, futility, jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1991), 6-7. The origins of this rhetoric in late eighteenth century Spain are described inJavier Herrero, Los orígenes del pensamiento reaccionario español (Madrid: Alianza, 1988), 151-180.19

Juan Bravo Murillo, “La Internacional y las españolas” (1872), reprinted in José Álvarez Junco, LaComuna en España (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1971), 233; Salvio Valentí, Del éxodo al paraíso: ensayo decomunismo libertario (Barcelona, 1933), 25.20 Marc Angenot, Rhétorique de l’anti-socialisme: essai d'historie discursive, 1830-1917 (Québec: LesPresses de l’Université Laval, 2004), 67.21 Emilio Castelar, “El socialismo”, in Nilo María Fabra, El problema social, 2nd edition (Madrid, 1892).22 Ricardo León, Bajo el yugo de los bárbaros (Madrid, 1932), 56.23 Nilo María Fabra, “El triunfo de la igualdad” (1885), in Relatos de ciencia-ficción (Madrid: LaBiblioteca del Laberinto, 2006), 27-35; see also his “Lo presente juzgado por lo porvenir. En el siglo XX”(1895), in Relatos de ciencia ficción, 87-94.24 Carmen San Sebastián, Tiempos nuevos (Madrid, 1933), 361-62.25 Kumar, Utopia, 123-25.26 Manuel Pérez Ledesma, “El miedo de los acomodados y la moral de los obreros”, in Otras visiones de

España, ed. Pilar Folguera (Madrid: Pablo Iglesias, 1993), 28.27 Luis Antón del Olmet, “La verdad en la ilusión”, in Espejo de los humildes (Madrid, 1913), 179-180.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.26.2.0383http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.26.2.0383


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28 Miguel Ángel Calvo Roselló, “Un país extraño”, Blanco y Negro, September 28, 1919, 22-33.29 Pascual Santacruz, Los desengaños de un comunista (Madrid, 1929), 30-31.30 León, Bárbaros, 138-39.31 Nerea Aresti, Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2001), 91-113.32

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, El paraíso de las mujeres (Valencia, 1922), 110-128.33 Lázaro Clendábims [Carlos Mendizábal], Elois y Morlocks: novela de lo por venir (Barcelona, 1909), 2vols.34 Valentí, Éxodo, 89-90.35 Mechthild Albert, Vanguardistas de camisa azul: la trayectoria de los escritores Tomás Borrás, Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval, Samuel Ros y Antonio de Obregón entre 1925 y 1940 (Madrid: Visor, 2003), 309.36 Miguel de Unamuno, “Mecanópolis”, Los Lunes de “El Imparcial”, August 11, 1913; English versionin Cosmos Latinos: an Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, eds. Andrea L. Belland Yolanda Molina-Gavilar (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 47-51. 37 Juan Cano Ballesta, Las estrategias de la imaginación: utopías literarias y retórica política bajo el franquismo (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1994), 45-53.38 León, Bárbaros, 289-91.39 Agustín de Foxá, “Profecías y símbolos de las termitas” (1935), in Historias de ciencia ficción: relatos,

teatro, artículos (Madrid: La Biblioteca del Laberinto, 2009), 207-208.40 Foxá, “Las alas enterradas” (1952), in Historias de ciencia-ficción, 219-223.41 Historia de Andresillo o el comunismo visto por dentro. Dedicado a las clases trabajadoras deExtremadura (Madrid, 1872), 30-31.42 Bravo Murillo, “La Internacional y las españolas”, 238.43 Manuel Mariátegui y Vinyals (count of San Bernardo), preface to Eugen Richter, Adónde conduce elsocialismo (diario de un obrero) (Madrid, 1896), 9-10.44 Lyman Tower Sargent “Do dystopias matter?”, in Dystopia(n) matters, ed. Fatima Vieira (Newcastle,Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 10-13.45 León, Bárbaros, 167-68, Erika Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East and West. Universe of Terror andTrial (Québec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 3-4.46 Foxá, “Otoño de 3006. Drama del futuro, en prosa” (1954), in Historias de ciencia ficción, 151-206.47 Martín Rodríguez, “Science Fiction as Mainstream Literature…”48 Mariano Martín Rodríguez, “Los novecentistas en Londres y la aclimatación del scientific romance enEspaña”, Revista de Filología Románica (2011), 211-239. 49 Antonio Flores, Ayer, hoy y mañana (Madrid, 1863-1864); Enrique Gaspar, The time-ship: achrononautical journey (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2012) [translation of Elanacronópete (Barcelona, 1887)]. An overview of this literature, in Geraldine Lawless, Modernity’smetonyms: figuring time in Nineteenth Century Spanish stories (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,2011).50 Alkon, Origins, 117.51 León, Bárbaros, 133-134.52 Carmelina Imbroscio, “Utopie et rêve / utopie et uchronie”, in Histoire transnationale de l’utopielittéraire et de l’utopisme, eds. Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson (Paris: H. Champion, 2008), 824-826.53 San Sebastián, Tiempos nuevos, 67.54 Julio Bravo, El tratado de Heligoland (Madrid, 1924), re-edited as Hombres: novela sintética (Madrid,1931).55 N. Tassin, La catástrofe. Novela fantástica (Madrid, 1924); revised version of N. Tasin, Katastrofa: fantasticheskīĭ roman (Berlin, 1922).56 Enrique Sánchez Rubio, Los últimos capítulos de la historia desde la revolución bolchevique hasta el fin del mundo con algunos episodios novelescos: fantasía filosófico-histórica y profética (Barcelona,1930), 2 vols.57 León, Bárbaros, 56 .58 Pérez de Ayala, Revolución, 9.59 Tom Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini, “Dystopia and histories”, in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction andthe Dystopian Imagination, eds. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5.60 Pérez de Ayala, Revolución, 10-11.61 Olmet, Verdad , 166-67.62 León, Bárbaros, 197-199.63 Agustín de Foxá, “Las alas enterradas” (1952), in Historias de ciencia-ficción, 219-223.


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64 Jaime de Foxá, Marea verde (Madrid, 1951), 200-205.65 Beaumont, “Cacotopianism”, 478.66 Bravo Murillo, “La Internacional”, 233.67 Chris Ealham, Class, culture and conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (London-New York: Routledge,2005), 10-11.68

Valentí, Éxodo, 42-44.69 Foxá, Marea, 167, 199.70 Historia de Andresillo, 19.71 Nilo María Fabra, El problema social (Madrid, 1890).72 Ángeles Vicente, “Cuento absurdo”, in Los buitres (Madrid, 1908), 124.73 León, Bárbaros, 33.74 León, Bárbaros, 280-84.75 Calvo Roselló, “Un país extraño”, 31-33.76 Fabra, El problema social, 69-74; Santacruz, Desengaños, 55.77 Juan José Valverde, La bestia del apocalipsis (Andújar, 1935).

78 Foxá, Marea, 205-206.79 Gary Saul Morson, “Anti-utopia as a parodic genre”, in The Boundaries of Genre (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 115-42; Christopher Ferns, Narrating utopia ideology: gender,

form in utopian literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 109-130.80 Bravo, Tratado. 81 Martín Rodríguez, “Science Fiction as Mainstream Literature”; Agustín Coletes Blanco, La huellaanglonorteamericana en la novela de Pérez de Ayala (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1987), 37. 82 Gorman Beauchamp, “The proto-dystopia of Jerome K. Jerome”, Extrapolation 24 (June 1983), 170-181; Tom Moylan, Scraps of the untainted sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, Co:Westview Press, 2000), 111-121.83 Martín Rodríguez, “Science Fiction”. 84 Antonis Balasopoulos, “Anti-utopia and dystopia: Re-thinking the generic field”, Utopia ProjectArchive (Athens: School of Fine Arts Publications, 2011), 66-67, accessed 12 February 2015.85 Brian J. Dendle, “A forgotten subgenre: the novela científica”, España contemporánea, 2 (1995), 21-32.86 Tassin, La catástrofe. 87 Agustín Jaureguízar, “Narraciones españolas del fin del mundo”, I, II and III, Arbor 747, 749 and 751(2011), doi:10.3989/arbor.2011.749n3014, accessed 12 February 2015; W. Warren Wagar, TerminalVisions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).88 Vicente, “Cuento absurdo”, 109-139; M.R. Blanco Belmonte, “El ocaso de la humanidad”, Blanco y Negro, May 19, 1918, 9-11.89 Sánchez Rubio, Capítulos.90 León, Bárbaros, 23891 Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias”, Daedalus 2 (Spring 1965), 323-347. 92 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2004), 263-270.93 Two interesting variations on the dystopian/fantastic theme from a social revolutionary point of view are José Mas, En la selvática Bribonicia (Madrid, 1932) and Ramón J. Sender, La noche de las ciencabezas: novela del tiempo de delirio (Madrid, 1934).94 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, 2013 [1936]), 206–7. 95 See Histoire transnationale de l’utopie littéraire et de l’utopisme, Vita Fortunati and RaymondTrousson eds.96 Hugo García, “War and culture in Nationalist Spain, 1936–39. Testimony and fiction in the literatureon the Red Terror”, Journal of War and Culture Studies 2.3 (2009), 289-304.97 Paloma Aguilar, Memory and amnesia: the role of the Sanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, New York, 2002; Jesús Izquierdo: “Distopías cainitas: Guerra, locura y cambio social en procesos de transición”, unpublished paper, 2014.98 See Ibsen Martínez, “No puede pasar aquí”, El País, 9 December 2014, a fantasy on a SpanishVenezuela ruled by Podemos; and John Carlin, “Agosto de 2020,” El País, August 10, 2015, a satire on acoming “populist” alliance between a Spain ruled by Podemos, Greece under Syriza, Britain underJeremy Corbyn and Russia under Vladimir Putin against American president’s Donald Trump’s decisionto invade Mexico.

"Barbarians Telescreens and Jazz: Reactionary uchronias in Modern Spain, 1870-1960"

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