Joan Sales

Joan Sales (Barcelona, 1912-1983) was a writer and publisher. He obtained a degree in Law in 1932 and was a member of Bloc Obrer i Camperol (BOC – Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc) and PSUC (the Catalan Communist Party – [literally] “United Socialist Party of Catalonia”). In the Civil War he fought on the Madrid and Aragon fronts, after which he went into exile in France in 1939. In 1942 he moved to Mexico and then returned to Catalonia in 1948, after which he became a publisher. His collection of poems Viatge d'un moribund (A Dying Man’s Journey) was published in 1952 and this was followed by his most famous novel Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory), which did not appear in its definitive edition until 1971.

There are few writers like Joan Sales, who leave in the reader a sense that is so alive, direct and intense of his desire to explain himself: to explain himself and explain everything as if wishing to preserve from oblivion and confusion all that he has experienced. His response to this desire seems to have been all the episodes and characters making up the great frieze of Incerta glòria(Uncertain Glory), and the constant narrative meanderings that detain and disperse the narrative thread, giving the impression of having been driven by the imperative of testifying to their world without holding back any memory, any nuance or any sensation. Then again, the constant corrections and amplifications to which Sales submitted the novel - in 1956, 1962, 1969, 1971, 1981 - also make one think (censorship aside) of this same wish not to overlook anything and to give reverberation to what has already been said so as to make it even more revealing of an unrepeatable experience. Finally, this also seems to suggest that Joan Sales' entire literary work - Incerta glòria, Cartes a Màrius Torres, (Letters to Marius Torres) and Viatge d'un moribund (A Dying Man's Journey) - is nothing more nor less than variations on the theme of the same literary world, the same experience, to which he returns again and again. The literary sensibility transpired by all this material is, I insist, that of a great conversationalist. This is a fervent conversationalist who is passionate about his story - a mixture of moral duty and narrative passion - and who wants to bear witness to what he has seen and felt as if it depended on him, and him alone, to let us know.

And it did depend on him. Even if only with regard to the material of the novel, Sales must have been aware that telling stories about the Civil War from the point of view of the vanquished was not precisely the most propagated version in 1956. Still less when the leading characters, who are unequivocally portrayed as defending the legality of the Republic by taking up arms, should have Christianity as a constant theme in their epistolary conversations - and in their lives - thereby compensating for the ideological schematisation and polarisation that each of the two sides encouraged.

This, however, is a stance that goes far beyond an honest desire for historical equanimity. Joan Sales' characters have dense inner worlds and thus really live the war without being merely its symptom. For Joan Sales, a man is not the side he is on, and to understand this it is necessary to recall that the characters - and Sales himself - do not think twice about risking their lives for their convictions. The war, in this sense, is an inescapable circumstance, but not the identity, of Sales' narrative world. This perspective bestows on the historical frieze a complexity that is as uncomfortable as it is valuable and characters as different as an anarchist and a soup noodle manufacturer are presented to the reader with direct, authentic and convincing emotional proximity. Sales does this with the naturalness of one who speaks of personalities and not, therefore, of figures that are ready-made for the consumption of idealisation or discrediting. Continue reading...