Gabriel Miró's "El abuelo del rey" and the Politics of Spain

Abstract

The texts of Gabriel Miro have often been set in a geographical, a paisajista, context. They have also been given universalist readings. But though they have from the start been enmeshed in the great Spanish debates between left and right, there has been less interest in readings that insert them into history, or any broad political context. Rafael Bosch made an important start in 1970 in the first volume of his La novela espanola del siglo XX, but while his Lukacsian approach is valuably provocative, his reading of particular texts can be disappointingly crude. Thus, of Las cerezas del cementerio he writes: ‘La muerte de su protagonista es un mero simbolo distorsionado de la extincion de su clase.’1 And in a more extended comment on the Oleza novels, full of ideas, he reads the bishop as an entirely negative figure, stylistically turned into an object. Thus Miro becomes the acusador de las causas de esta deshumanizacion de la vida, producida en una sociedad atrasada y semialdeana cuando las antiguas estr...