Esperanzas y desencantos. La España de Ruedo ibérico y el Viaje al sur de Juan Marsé

In the 1960s, the Franco regime launched a campaign to construct an image of the Spanish nation that aimed to edulcorate the regime and anchor the country in Europe. The opposition, mainly from exile, tried to challenge this image of Spain, constructing a critical discourse against the regime, which confronted the sweetened image of Franco’s Spain. Juan Marsé, in collaboration with the publishers Ruedo ibérico, contributes to this task with a work which, however, was not published at the time, but posthumously in 2020: Viaje al sur (Journey to the South). His portrait of the Spanish people is darker than that of the publisher’s other projects. The optimism towards the working classes and their mobilisation against the regime perceptible in these publishing projects seems to crumble in the story of a “writer of the people” who never wanted to be one. In this sense, Marsé’s gaze enters into dialogue with, and at the same time disputes, an idealisation of the Spanish people that the author from Barcelona was not willing to nurture. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the publisher finally decided to shelve what Marsé thought was his best book to date. This text studies the dialogue established by the writer between the different ways of understanding what actually constitutes being Spanish and Andalusian in the context of the Spain of developmentalism. In order to do so, it analyses Viaje al sur in its historical context and in dialogue with other Ruedo ibérico publishing projects. It reconstructs the various discourses on the Spanish nation in relation to which Marsé constructed his own conception of Spain and his countrymen. The article argues that this conception of Spaniards helps to understand the author’s trajectory and his encounters and disagreements with those who wanted him to be the voice of working-class Spain.