In what kind of biography is the protagonist's name not mentioned? Well in A biography, by Chumy Chúmez, pseudonym of José María González Castrillo (1927-2003). The humorist and writer published this book that borders on the unusual in 1972. It has just been recovered by the Pepitas publishing house, with a necessary prologue by Santiago Aguilar and Felipe Cabrerizo, experts in 20th century humor.
Necessary because this is not Chumy's classic book, in which one can find his vignettes of dangerous humor, as Ivan Tubau described it in Graphic humor in the Francoist press. For this more than invented biography, Chumy spent five years cutting out engravings from books and magazines “with tears in his eyes”, and composing with these cuttings a surreal and dreamlike story, at times innocent, at times very black and, on almost every page , with a good dose of social criticism. As Aguilar and Cabrerizo tell it, the book shows the influence of the collage-novels by Max Ernst and collage humorous that passed through the pages of The Quail, magazine with which Chumy collaborated before founding Brother Wolf, also in 1972, with the intention of finding a space for a more acidic and more committed humor (“within what is possible”, as the subtitle on the cover warned).
This is a very rare biography, let it be clear: this nameless narrator dies and is reborn several times. Nor do we know where a story takes place that the illustrations in magazines from the late 19th and early 20th centuries seem to place outside of time. Despite the initial confusion, the presence of the best-known Chumy is noticeable. For example, in the social criticism already mentioned, above all, towards those rich and powerful people who in their cartoons appeared dressed in top hats and who in these engravings do not stray far from the caricature image. Of course, there is black humor: the story begins with a shipwreck in front of a fishing village and the narrator says that “the dead were piling up on the beaches, ready for sale to the canning factories.”
We can follow the veiled trail of real events, such as the Civil War that the author lived through as a child: “Centuries of hatred exploded into the air,” he writes, and then adds with cruelty and irony: “Still, when I see a good fire, I “It brings tears to my eyes thinking of the sweet days of my distant and lost childhood.” This extremely harsh humor is also present in another autobiographical book, I was happy in the war (1986), where he writes that “among so much pain and so much misfortune” he lived “the happiest time” that he remembers: “It was summer, he was on vacation” and “he constantly heard horrible stories of the killings, shootings and mutilations.” In conclusion, “what more could a child's heart that was then opening to life ask for?”
There is no shortage of references to repression and the moralistic closedness of the dictatorship: “Unknowingly, I was sinning in thought, word and deed all day long.” And he describes a gray environment in which “only inner freedom remained, which is the saddest of freedoms.” Chumy is given time, among many other things, in just a hundred pages, to imagine a happy world in which machines will have solved all problems and our corpses will be used as agricultural fertilizer (compared to the canned food from the beginning). This satire of developmental, mechanistic and, above all, not very human utopias is still valid at a time like the present, in which the gurus of artificial intelligence promise us a dubious algorithmic paradise.
A biography It was a different book when it was published more than half a century ago and it remains so now. It still amazes us by speaking to us—with its own language—of a conflictive past and a utopian and, therefore, suspicious future. Everything is summarized in the previous warning: Chumy writes that this fictional biography is “pure fiction,” but then adds that “any resemblance to reality and the people who inhabit it is purely a voluntary coincidence of the author.”
Chumy Chumez
Pepitas Editorial, 2023
112 pages, 26.50 euros
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