Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Commitment to the present

Text and selection of content: Georges Tyras

Reference of collective life

In the years following the death of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, people – in particular those who used to read his Monday column in El País – would wonder, when faced with any kind of event occurring in Spain or anywhere in the world: “What would Manolo think?” It was, and still is, a way of underlining the role of reference point, as a lookout of the collective life, that Manuel Vázquez Montalbán performed throughout his life and in all the territories of his writing. Born with the civil war, Vázquez Montalbán experienced and suffered, on the losing side, a long post-war era that forged a visceral anti-Francoist conviction.

As an intellectual, he couldn’t help but be committed. To memory, to his time, to his city, to his social class, to writing. Hence he always combined personal involvement in public life with a creative activity that encompassed journalism, poetry, the novel, the essay, and much more besides. Joining the PSUC after a spell in support of Felipe [Gonzalez], participation in the La Pau: diari de la Pau, against the first Gulf War, the tireless search for the historic subject of change, with the travels to Latin America, are some facts, among many others, that attest to the scale of the committed intellectual that Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was despite all the disillusionments…

Selection of texts

Commitment
Commitment
  • «From a left-wing perspective, one is astounded that after a century of working class struggle, in which there have been many deaths, the working class that has not achieved even one hour off work or twenty pence without deaths now has to be grateful simply because a worker is assured severance pay. This means a breach of the moral code.» (Lola Díaz, “Vuelve Pepe Carvalho” (Interview with MVM), Cambio 16, no. 653, 4 VI 1984)
  • «The commitment until 1978 was called anti-fascism; after the Constitution was enacted it was called integrating Spain into full modernity, in every dimension, from any official position.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, “Tal como éramos”, El hermano pequeño, Planeta, 1994, p. 127).
  • «The commitment to ideas is the commitment to reality and knowing what is the political, social and historical reality since the dawn of time. This is something one accepts when one is born into a world of victims of a civil war. It is a commitment that does not abandon one in life and that leads one to seek instruments to change things. Political commitment is like a marriage that one enters into with an infinite number of people who share the same ideas.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Interview by Julio Luzán, La Calle, 23 X 1979).
Anti-Francoism
  • «Francoism was extremely ugly; it was tacky. Not even its mass movements had the morbid grandeur of those of Nazism. It was a militaristic aesthetic, and gave the impression that everyone was wearing smelly socks.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Interview by Xavier Moret, El País, 26 X 1992)
  • «The historians of the future, including those of the present, will not have lived through the cruelty, the brazenness, the mediocrity of Francoism. […] – Francoism was a noise, that was a noise all right, that interrupted the message of democracy…of freedom…» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Autobiografía del general Franco. Planeta, 1992, p. 651) (imatge 3.Memòria_4.jpg)
  • «There was a sociological Francoism that still lives on to a greater or lesser extent and a rhetoric of Francoism that recall the best years, the ones from 1962 or 1963 to the early seventies, and forgets the years of penury and the subsequent economic crisis that was hatched during the Franco era. Many sectors of sociological Francoism have mythologised the years that were good ones in economic terms, but one has to remember that these were based on exporting the unemployed first to Catalonia and the Basque Country and then to Europe.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Interview by Xavier Moret, El País, 26 X 1992)
Barcelona-ism
  • «The destruction of its landscapes and its leading figures was total. The city was unrecognisable. […] the post-Olympic city, open to the sea, criss-crossed by fast roads, in the middle of the destruction of the Barrio Chino, the light aircraft of political correctness flying over the city, fumigating it to kill its bacteria, its historical viruses, the social struggles, the lumpen, a city now without groins, a city with its groins cut out, converted into a prophylactic theatre to act out the farse of modernity.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Quinteto de Buenos Aires. Planeta, 1997, p. 16-17) (imatge 2.Novel·la negra_9.jpg)
  • «Perhaps it is something people assume about me [Barcelona-ism] because almost all my literature is grounded in the stuff of Barcelona of the space I share and the time I have lived through. |…] I have let myself be led astray by a series of inadequate falsehoods: a false spontaneity, a no less false automatism of personal and cultured memory and an undemonstrable erudite effort, on which I don’t insist so as not to enter the preserve of the historians and social scientists whom I respect and admire. It’s not a “poetic” book, nor is it an “historical” book, but rather a documented yet subjective chronicle, according to the method of writing I have already tried out in the past.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, “prologue”, Barcelonas. Empurias, 1987, p. 7)
Writing
  • «I still believe in the division of labour, in the idea that if some of us do a job that consists in accumulating knowledge and distributing it through language, that entails a social responsibility. Whether you take it on board or not is another matter, that you accept it in a more or less explicit manner is also a free fact. I start from the principle that if you have taken up a particular position you have to clarify it with the necessary codes. You can’t write poetry denouncing Bush or converting the novel into a territory of ideological education for the masses. But neither do you have to conceal what you think, because politics is also literary material.» «Defensa de la utopia». Revista Fusión. November 2002.
  • «I would like to know how to write […] to tell all this, because nobody will ever tell it and these people will die when their time comes to die, I don’t know if you may ever have thought about it. To know how to express oneself, to know how to put down on paper what you think and feel is like being able to send messages in a bottle to posterity. Each neighbourhood should have at least one poet and one chronicler so that many years from now, in some special museums, people will be able to relive through memory.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, El pianista. Seix Barral, 1985, p. 138-39)
Globalisation
  • «From Kalfon’s book [Pierre Kalfon: ‘Ernesto Che Guevara, a legend of our century’) I stress the contrast between the imaginary of the guerilla fighter cut off from his communications, Guevara, and the media-friendly guerilla, the subcomandanteMarcos; Guevara was perhaps the last exponent of the dramaturgy of armed revolution and Marcos the first of the televised revolution, despite Frank Zappa [sic] singing in the nineteen sixties: ‘No, the revolution will not be televised.’ In any case, Guevara and Marcos appear to be sons of that magical or perhaps exclusively fun meeting between Marx and Rimbaud that was the stuff of dreams in all the Mays of the nineteen sixties: to change Life, to change History.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, “El Che en el supermercado de la transgresión”  Le Monde, 9 X 1997, with the title “Un cauchemar pour la pensée unique”)
  • «The problem now is to find out who is the historic subject of change, that is to say, whowants or needs to change things. And here, within the current phase of development of capitalism that is called globalisation, we would be in the land of the losers. Just as in the stage of slavery one spoke of the master and the slave, in the subsequent stage of aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, then of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, now we have a tension between globalisers and globalised.» («Defensa de la utopia». Revista Fusión. November 2002).
  • «From a left-wing perspective, one is astounded that after a century of working class struggle, in which there have been many deaths, the working class that has not achieved even one hour off work or twenty pence without deaths now has to be grateful simply because a worker is assured severance pay. This means a breach of the moral code.» (Lola Díaz, “Vuelve Pepe Carvalho” (Interview with MVM), Cambio 16, no. 653, 4 VI 1984)
  • «The commitment until 1978 was called anti-fascism; after the Constitution was enacted it was called integrating Spain into full modernity, in every dimension, from any official position.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, “Tal como éramos”, El hermano pequeño, Planeta, 1994, p. 127).
  • «The commitment to ideas is the commitment to reality and knowing what is the political, social and historical reality since the dawn of time. This is something one accepts when one is born into a world of victims of a civil war. It is a commitment that does not abandon one in life and that leads one to seek instruments to change things. Political commitment is like a marriage that one enters into with an infinite number of people who share the same ideas.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Interview by Julio Luzán, La Calle, 23 X 1979).
  • «Francoism was extremely ugly; it was tacky. Not even its mass movements had the morbid grandeur of those of Nazism. It was a militaristic aesthetic, and gave the impression that everyone was wearing smelly socks.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Interview by Xavier Moret, El País, 26 X 1992)
  • «The historians of the future, including those of the present, will not have lived through the cruelty, the brazenness, the mediocrity of Francoism. […] – Francoism was a noise, that was a noise all right, that interrupted the message of democracy…of freedom…» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Autobiografía del general Franco. Planeta, 1992, p. 651) (imatge 3.Memòria_4.jpg)
  • «There was a sociological Francoism that still lives on to a greater or lesser extent and a rhetoric of Francoism that recall the best years, the ones from 1962 or 1963 to the early seventies, and forgets the years of penury and the subsequent economic crisis that was hatched during the Franco era. Many sectors of sociological Francoism have mythologised the years that were good ones in economic terms, but one has to remember that these were based on exporting the unemployed first to Catalonia and the Basque Country and then to Europe.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Interview by Xavier Moret, El País, 26 X 1992)
  • «The destruction of its landscapes and its leading figures was total. The city was unrecognisable. […] the post-Olympic city, open to the sea, criss-crossed by fast roads, in the middle of the destruction of the Barrio Chino, the light aircraft of political correctness flying over the city, fumigating it to kill its bacteria, its historical viruses, the social struggles, the lumpen, a city now without groins, a city with its groins cut out, converted into a prophylactic theatre to act out the farse of modernity.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Quinteto de Buenos Aires. Planeta, 1997, p. 16-17) (imatge 2.Novel·la negra_9.jpg)
  • «Perhaps it is something people assume about me [Barcelona-ism] because almost all my literature is grounded in the stuff of Barcelona of the space I share and the time I have lived through. |…] I have let myself be led astray by a series of inadequate falsehoods: a false spontaneity, a no less false automatism of personal and cultured memory and an undemonstrable erudite effort, on which I don’t insist so as not to enter the preserve of the historians and social scientists whom I respect and admire. It’s not a “poetic” book, nor is it an “historical” book, but rather a documented yet subjective chronicle, according to the method of writing I have already tried out in the past.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, “prologue”, Barcelonas. Empurias, 1987, p. 7)
  • «I still believe in the division of labour, in the idea that if some of us do a job that consists in accumulating knowledge and distributing it through language, that entails a social responsibility. Whether you take it on board or not is another matter, that you accept it in a more or less explicit manner is also a free fact. I start from the principle that if you have taken up a particular position you have to clarify it with the necessary codes. You can’t write poetry denouncing Bush or converting the novel into a territory of ideological education for the masses. But neither do you have to conceal what you think, because politics is also literary material.» «Defensa de la utopia». Revista Fusión. November 2002.
  • «I would like to know how to write […] to tell all this, because nobody will ever tell it and these people will die when their time comes to die, I don’t know if you may ever have thought about it. To know how to express oneself, to know how to put down on paper what you think and feel is like being able to send messages in a bottle to posterity. Each neighbourhood should have at least one poet and one chronicler so that many years from now, in some special museums, people will be able to relive through memory.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, El pianista. Seix Barral, 1985, p. 138-39)
  • «From Kalfon’s book [Pierre Kalfon: ‘Ernesto Che Guevara, a legend of our century’) I stress the contrast between the imaginary of the guerilla fighter cut off from his communications, Guevara, and the media-friendly guerilla, the subcomandanteMarcos; Guevara was perhaps the last exponent of the dramaturgy of armed revolution and Marcos the first of the televised revolution, despite Frank Zappa [sic] singing in the nineteen sixties: ‘No, the revolution will not be televised.’ In any case, Guevara and Marcos appear to be sons of that magical or perhaps exclusively fun meeting between Marx and Rimbaud that was the stuff of dreams in all the Mays of the nineteen sixties: to change Life, to change History.» (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, “El Che en el supermercado de la transgresión”  Le Monde, 9 X 1997, with the title “Un cauchemar pour la pensée unique”)
  • «The problem now is to find out who is the historic subject of change, that is to say, whowants or needs to change things. And here, within the current phase of development of capitalism that is called globalisation, we would be in the land of the losers. Just as in the stage of slavery one spoke of the master and the slave, in the subsequent stage of aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, then of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, now we have a tension between globalisers and globalised.» («Defensa de la utopia». Revista Fusión. November 2002).

Contributions

Audiovisual and songs

  • Resistence. At: Epílogo. Canal+. 18 October 2002.4:53 – 5:27

  • Desenchantement. At: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán a Fondo. Interview by Joaquín Soler Serrano. Editrama. 21 October 1979. 42:55 – 43:55

  • Militancy. At: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán a Fondo. Interview by Joaquín Soler Serrano. Editrama. 21 October 1979. 46:49 – 48:27

  • Tatuaje. Music by Manuel Quiroga; lyrics by Rafael de León and Xandro Valerio. Performed by Concha Piquer. VintageMusic.es.

  • Suspiros de España. Music by Antonio Álvarez Alonso; lyrics by José Antonio Álvarez Cantos. Performed by Estrella Morente. Universal Music Group.