A literary ‘no to war’

I recently received a message from a friend who lives in Estonia: he respectfully reproached me for my pacifist stance now that Europe seems to be preparing for World War III, and stated that he is training as a volunteer in the army of the country where he lives: his body is exercises to defend against a potential attack by Putin. After reading it, my skin crawled; His hands shook so much that, until today, I have not been able to answer him; and it is likely that our friendship has been diminished by my silence. I simply do not conceive of the possibility of a large-scale conflict – I would have liked to answer – precisely because war seems to me to be an elusive beast. Since I read The danger of being sane (2022), essay by Rosa Montero, I have known that perhaps I am a HSP (Highly Sensitive Person), but, beyond self-diagnosis, neither my family upbringing nor subsequent experiences have prepared me for savagery of such caliber. As a child, my mother did not turn off the television if sex scenes were on, arguing that, socially, we have developed an excessive tolerance towards violence and an incomprehensible puritanism regarding affection, so I grew up free of fear of nudity and the amorous arts — not humiliating—but censoring any minimal oppression of the other, whether it be a Western or the ballistic spectacularity of a Tarantino. However, what ended up reinforcing my repudiation of violence was living in the United States, immersed in the ubiquity of weapons, which on several occasions felt very close to me: shootings near my home or the university.

Now that forgotten ghosts thunder at us again, I think about the books I read, the compilation of destroyed souls traveling through an imagination with which I shape my own notion of citizenship, and they beat, showing me the path not to follow under any circumstances. Thomas Bernhard emerges, whose autobiographical stories (2023) dry the flowers and turn them into shavings. The genius of German letters describes in ‘The Origin’ how he learned to identify his violin lessons with the desire to commit suicide and, when in the middle of World War II he was still playing the instrument as a student at a boarding school, he developed a rash. “monstrosity as beauty, and it did not produce any terror in me, suddenly I was faced with the absolute brutality of war, and at the same time I was fascinated by that monstrosity”, probably due to an intention to escape it by its own means. Bernhard has been branded a tormented nihilist, although in his pages he exudes a very powerful anti-heroism that contrasts individual ethics with collective massacre. Discussing as subjects who do not want to die and, above all, do not want to kill is a constant in European literature, ranging from Günter Grass to the poetic art of Anselm Kiefer and passing through great works such as Claus and Lucas, by Agota Kristof —republished in 2019—, where the Hungarian author shows two twins immersed in such cruelty towards themselves and others that they make them want to never make a bomb. Exiled in Switzerland, immersed in a strange language (French) during the limited time she had from her job in a factory, she even said, when someone commented that foreigners were always making collections to pay for the flower crowns of some victims of autolysis, that “everyone has fun as they can.”

It is no coincidence that this rejection of war has occurred especially in women who experienced it closely. In Time to cry (republished in 2021), María Luisa Elío tells of an uprooting that pierced her since childhood and led to the only film made exclusively by Spanish exiles, marked by the theme of her desires: On the empty balcony (1962). Nor did Mercè Rodoreda find peace in the vicissitudes of war, judging by her emotional novel Diamond Square, launched the same year, and only in the recovered Memory of melancholy (2021) María Teresa León experiences a longing for the fight based on her robust communist convictions, the same ones that led her to claim tooth and nail the legitimacy of the republican government and, under a hail of shrapnel, lead the transfer of the Prado Museum from Madrid to Valencia, in whose rescue she would later be succeeded by the painter Timoteo Pérez Rubio. But, if there is someone who can record pain and transform it into threads with which to weave a devastating tapestry, it is the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Aleksievich, whom she would like to emphasize. The Zinc Boys (2016). This chronicle of the war in Afghanistan reflects the loss of ideals that, although they fueled triumphalist feats during the time of Stalin, on the verge of the fall of the Berlin Wall no longer convince anyone: “Why should I follow orders? stupid and criminal? Why should I become a murderer?” asks one of the characters. The book thus exemplifies a postmodern fracture that prioritizes life over the necrophilia of the state, which no ideology justifies.

Perhaps representative of this trend, the separation between the conflagration and the ideological corpus that should sustain it, is The peninsula of empty houses (2024), by David Uclés, a novel laudable in ambition, telling the civil war from magical realism, which produces a turn in the profuse cultural industry around our fratricidal massacre. In it, the young author cannot avoid an abysmal distancing with the characters in the form of an intrusive narrator and explicit historical documentation. This original approach reveals a problem with generational roots: we cannot swallow any warlike intention, it does not fit in our stomachs; socialized in well-being and the paradigm of human rights, bloodthirsty annihilation repels us even in the choice of a literary position. Maybe Uclés is PAS too, but the truth is that dying and killing do not challenge us and with that, ah!, Europe will also have to deal with.

Azahara Palomeque She is a writer. Her latest book is ‘Living worse than our parents’ (Anagrama, 2023).

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