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Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín and the Novel of Revolution

Born in the provincial capital of Ourense in 1938, “X.L. Méndez Ferrín” (this is how he signs his works) is one of Galicia’s greatest living prose writers and the author of a series of political novels that gradually eschewed the conventions of realism. The first of these novels was Retorno a Tagen Ata, written in prison in 1970 and published the following year. Retorno is anachronistically set in the 1960s, during the slow decline of literary socio-realism and the overlapping vogue of the fantastic mode, which among Galician-born authors was informed by the transculturation of philo-Celtic myths and the rewriting of chivalric stories of Breton inspiration. Ferrín’s novella implements a timidly experimental aesthetic by comparison with the latemodernist Spanish-language works of the same decade. Certain techniques of the female Bildungsroman and the medieval quest romance are incorporated into the book’s main plot, which deals with the preparatory stages leading up to an armed insurgency in Tagen Ata––a fictive counterpart to Galicia, one of Spain’s “historic” sub-state nations with an autochthonous romance language different from Castilian. Tagen Ata’s various radicalized groups (landless peasants, nationalist intellectuals, factory workers) are summoned to join their heterogeneous forces to break away from an authoritarian state, Terra Ancha. The latter implicitly stands for Franco’s Castilian-centric Spain although it may also represent any strongly bureaucratized state which does not recognize a plurality of discrete nations within itself. Writing in 1970, Ferrín strategically treats Terra Ancha as if it were a democracy, although Spain did not have a free general election until June 1977, two months after the Communist Party was legalized. This deliberate discrepancy underlines the idea that the advent of a liberal-democratic state will not solve Spain’s long-standing problem of