Fables of Chance

Abstract

Chapter Three studies the social ontology of chancein Franco’s Spain by examining cultural objects that revolve around the representation of national lotteries, raffles, radio contests, and games of chance. These institutions configured a society of potential consumers in which the socialization of gains was achieved through gambling. By opening a collective horizon of economic expectations, those games of equal chance found a willing audience in a population eager to experience material gains after a long period of material deprivation. The circulation of capital and goods —or at least its growing representation in media— allowed Spanish citizens to recover a notion of contingency in which chance became a non-theological primum movens that could drive new social hopes. The collective fantasies around equal chance gaming grew in parallel with the social inequalities promoted by the regime’s economic policies, which rejected the public redistribution of wealth that was occurring in European welfare states. The effects of gambling are also examined in films such as Esa pareja feliz (Bardem and Berlanga, 1951), Felices Pascuas (Bardem, 1955), and Historias de la radio (Sáenz de Heredia 1955), in Antonio Buero Vallejo’s play Hoy es fiesta (1956), and in Juan Goytisolo’s novel Fiestas (1958).