Between Dystopia and Utopia in Catalonia: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Manuel De Pedrolo’s <i>Mecanoscrit del Segon Origen</i>

Manuel de Pedrolo (1918–1990) is one of the most important authors in Catalan, the language used by about ten million speakers in a variety of territories in Southwestern Europe.1 Pedrolo was born to an impoverished aristocratic family near Tàrrega, in Lleida,2 about 110 kilometers east of Barcelona. He moved to the Catalan capital city first in 1935 as an undergraduate student, and later in 1946 after the victory of fascist General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Pedrolo, who had fought on the Republican side, was one of the “red” losers heavily oppressed by the new regime. His literary career, started in 1949, was conditioned by Franco’s repressive linguistic policies, which resulted in the suppression of Catalan-language publishing for about one decade, and by the work of his cadre of ultra-conservative censors. A veritable real-life dystopia.Pedrolo had the dubious honor of eventually becoming the most often censored author in any of the Spanish languages (Spanish Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Basque) for, the censors claimed, his Catalanism, left-wing political opinions, offensive attitude against religion, and use of sexuality and indecorous language.3 He would often fool censors by resubmitting his work under a slightly altered title, but his constant troubles with Francoist censorship meant that many of his novels had to wait years before publication. In March 1972, he was even tried for public scandal due to the “immoral” scenes in his novel Un amor fora ciutat (Love outside the City 1959, published in 1970). The novel was withdrawn from circulation but reissued when the author was finally acquitted.4 Once Franco died in 1975, Pedrolo, who was always an ardent defender of Catalan independence (to the point that he adamantly rejected the attention of the Spanish-language media), faced different political problems. The restored regional Catalan Government, the Generalitat, eventually headed by Jordi Pujol (1980–2003), rejected independentism until the mid-2010s, preferring regional autonomy within Spain. Pedrolo became thus throughout the 1980s an uncomfortable reminder of Pujol’s rather limited ambition for the nation. Despite being, as noted, a major figure in Catalan literature and being honoured as such, his funeral was only attended by his wife, his daughter, and a friend.Manuel de Pedrolo published 128 volumes in all genres, always in Catalan, as he was convinced that Catalan literature could only be treated as a “normal” literature if the language was used in all literary manifestations, from poetry to journalism, passing through drama and the popular genres of the novel. He can be called, then, a utopian writer for his attitude in the dark times he lived in, beyond the content of his works. As an avid reader of detective fiction and of science fiction, Pedrolo was determined to practice these genres, both as a writer and also as an editor (he was responsible for the popular detective fiction collection La cúa de palla by Edicions 62). This ambition made Pedrolo a totally unique writer since, despite clearly being a literary author, he made no distinction between his more experimental writing and his genre fiction.Pedrolo’s masterpiece is, no doubt, the unfinished eleven-volume series Temps obert (Open Time, 1963–69) in which, starting with the bombing during the Civil War of the family house in Barcelona, each volume explores a different outcome of this tragic event in the life of the protagonist, Daniel Bastida. As regards his non-mimetic fiction Pedrolo had already made incursions into the fantastic with Mister Chase, Podeu Sortir (Mr. Chase, You May Come Out, 1955), when years later he published the truly disturbing dystopia Totes les Bèsties de Càrrega (All the Beasts of Burden, 1967), a novel which describes a grotesque, tyrannizing regime very easy to read as an allegory of Franco’s dictatorship. Paradoxically, since the censors paid scant attention to the fantastic, Pedrolo managed to publish this blatantly anti-Franco novel with no trouble. As he explained,This strategy also articulates Pedrolo’s main contribution to science fiction, Mecanoscrit del Segon Origen (1974), which I myself translated into English as Typescript of the Second Origin.6 His other main science fiction (SF) novels, Aquesta Matinada i Potser per Sempre (Early This Morning and Perhaps Forever, 1979) and Successimultani (Simultaneousevent, 1980), which he regarded as his best SF novel, are very solid contributions to the genre, but, being a product of a new post-Franco atmosphere, they lack the political urgency that both Totes les bèsties and Mecanoscrit express. Aquesta Matinada, written in 1976, tells a story set in 1991 about an alien being from another dimension who visits Barcelona through a portal set in a humble working-class neighbourhood. Successimultani is a story about time travel, set between the 1940s and the 1970s, in which the temporal paradoxes are neatly solved since the protagonist couple stick to the rule of only visiting times before they were born.Mecanoscrit del Segon Origen, published in November 1974, celebrates in 2024 its fiftieth anniversary, a date which will hopefully contribute to its being finally acknowledged as the universal classic it should be. Pedrolo was the translator into Catalan of William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954), and he seems to have learned from the English author the lesson that children can be the protagonists of harrowing novels aimed at adults. Intriguingly, Mecanoscrit also connects with the 1908 romance novel by Irish author Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon,7 as the story of two teens facing parenthood away from civilization. It is unlikely that Pedrolo read Stacpoole but he may have seen the 1949 film adaptation, which, oddly enough, passed the censors’ filter and was released in Spain in 1950 as La Isla Perdida. Franco’s censors, incidentally, also ignored Mecanoscrit, as they usually ignored SF.Mecanoscrit is a novel of moderate extension (only 45000 words) that narrates the effects of an attack by an alien species, which decimates all human and nonhuman mammals and destroys many buildings all over the planet. The aliens, eventually identified as the Volvians from planet Volvia, decide to occupy Earth, as the Epilogue explains, after a pandemic devastates their home planet. Pedrolo does not focus on the aliens, but on the aftermath of their cruel treatment of human life, which they practically destroy just to cleanse Earth of intelligent life previous to its possible occupation. Alba, a fourteen-year-old girl, and Dídac, who is just nine, survive because the death ray the aliens use does not work under water (probably the few persons they later come across in rather unpleasant encounters survive in the same way). Ironically, Alba is in the weir pool of their village, Benaura, trying to save Dídac, the son of a black man and a white woman, after he is attacked by the local bullies, who try to drown him. This is in itself exceptional, as Pedrolo anticipates with Dídac the xenophobia that has later been associated with the arrival in Catalonia of Northern African migrants from the 1990s onward, but also an important example of his own anti-racist discourse.Following the allegorical reading, it seems obvious that Pedrolo assumed his readers would see the alien Volvians as the embodiment of the destructiveness of Franco’s regime. He does not specify which form of government exists before the aliens invade, but Alba’s remark about how often his father was imprisoned for his progressive, liberal ideas is a significant clue. Pedrolo may have chosen his young protagonists perhaps to avoid commenting more directly on politics, but the fact is that while Alba and Dídac struggle to survive, she educates the boy in left-wing,8 atheistic values completely at odds with the education children were receiving in Francoist schools. The racism that Dídac suffers shows, in any case, that these children live in an unsympathetic society, which the catastrophe transforms into a gigantic cemetery, but also into an opportunity to renew human civilization. What no doubt captured the hearts and minds of Mecanoscrit’s many Catalan readers is the realization that, against all odds, the pair, and Alba in particular, manage to establish the foundations of a new, fair society, celebrated in the Epilogue set thousands of years later (a gimmick also used by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale). Alba is by then a figure half-forgotten in the mists of time, but the notebooks that narrate her story with Dídac are studied in that future as proof of their existence and of how close Earth once was to total destruction.Anglophone readers might find a priori nothing exceptional in a story of human regeneration after an alien invasion, but, naturally, Catalan readers found plenty to celebrate in it. The novel, published just one year before Franco’s death in 1975 and the end of his fascist regime, told us, Catalonians, that no matter how thoroughly our nation may be destroyed, we have the resilience and the capacity to rebuild it, a resilience personified by Alba and Dídac. This resonated with adult readers but completely enchanted the younger readers invited to read Mecanoscrit in the Catalan literature courses introduced in the new post-Franco secondary school, once the transition to democracy was consolidated by the government of Adolfo Suárez (1976–81).Pedrolo never intended Mecanoscrit to be read as young adult fiction, but his editor at Edicions 62 publicized the edition within the El cangur collection as appropriate for that type of readership. The young Catalan literature teachers in charge of introducing the subject recommended the novel to each other as a very good choice to attract new readers to the Catalan language, and Mecanoscrit was for many years compulsory reading in secondary school. I am myself a member of the first generation invited to read Pedrolo’s novel, which I devoured at aged fourteen, back in 1980, completely astonished that a girl my own age could have such remarkable courage. Many more adult and young readers felt the same admiration and surprise that, for once, the future of humankind was not in the hands of Anglo-American persons, but in the hands of two very resourceful children from rural Catalonia. The author, paradoxically, was far from happy with the immense success of Mecanoscrit, still today the best-selling Catalan-language novel ever, because, in his view, it diverted attention from the rest of his far less accessible fiction. He would never again write a novel that appealed to young readers, producing instead demanding texts such as the cryptic novel Crucifeminació (Crucifemination, 1987).9Whereas Pedrolo attracted plenty of academic attention, Mecanoscrit was usually ignored, with a quite visible discomfort about its genre and iconic status among young adult readers. Arbonès hardly mentions Mecanoscrit in his otherwise thorough study of Pedrolo’s works (up to 1980); he even questions whether it is science fiction at all, apparently because he identifies this genre only with space opera.10 In “Less Mecanoscrit and More Author,” Castañeda complains likewise that Pedrolo’s successful novel was “the moment of glory and the perfect excuse to neglect a much more extensive oeuvre with a clear sense of struggle for the national emancipation of the Catalan people,”11 forgetting that the author leaves the regeneration of the whole human species into the hands of two Catalan characters. Only Vidal, among the academic critics, suggests that whereas the choices of the secondary school teachers helped to popularize the novel, Mecanoscrit has evident merits: “the theme is attractive, it’s ‘modern’ and current, and the way to express it is also attractive and up-to-date.”12The fact is, however, that although Mecanoscrit remained very popular among the readers and in the media,13 by the time I started my own academic work on it, in 2016, there was only one academic study about it, Mathilde Bensoussan’s article “Mecanoscrit del Segon Origen de Manuel de Pedrolo: Una Nova Interpretació del Mite del Recomençament,” published in 1988.14 This is a clear sign, I believe, of the difficulties of the Catalan cultural establishment to acknowledge and understand Pedrolo’s contribution to SF, which is perplexing in view of the lack of significant utopian (or dystopian) fiction about Catalonia as a nation with significant independentist aspirations.15 As I have narrated in an extensive chronicle,16 I set out to redress the neglect surrounding Mecanoscrit quite by accident, as I am an English Studies specialist who did not write academically about Catalan literature. As a member of the Eurocon 2016 organizing committee, I volunteered to edit the volume that Cristina Macía, a well-known translator and fan activist heading that committee, decided to give the convention attendees. This volume consisted of the original text of Mecanoscrit, the Spanish translation by Domingo Santos and my own translation, later revised and republished in 2018 by Wesleyan University Press. I embarked then on my own utopian project of becoming Mecanoscrit’s militant translator, a concept I borrowed from noted translator Francesco Ardolino; my project, as it can be seen from this text, still continues today.In 2017, I edited a monographic issue for the online journal Alambique,17 which was later published as a book in Catalan translation,18 the first extensive study of the novel in that language. Since then, I have been tirelessly bringing Mecanoscrit into as many significant conversations as I can about dystopia, utopia, and SF in Catalonia and in Catalan, to fans and with academics. Most significantly, I coedited with Víctor Martínez-Gil a special issue of the Catalan Review, introducing Catalan literature specialists to the vibrant Catalan SF scene.19 My colleague and I anticipated much resistance from this quality journal to our unorthodox proposal but, here’s the fine irony, the editor William Viestenz welcomed it because he was familiar with my translation of Pedrolo. Also, no doubt, because as a US scholar used to the presence of SF in Anglophone university courses and scholarship, he is far more open to the genre than our local Catalan peers, always wary about undermining the prestige of Catalan literature with allegedly inferior literary productions (though I would insist that past and current Catalan SF is indeed literary).My militant defence of Mecanoscrit del Segon Origen has, no doubt, personal motivations: I was as fascinated by Pedrolo’s parable about survival against all odds at age fourteen, as I am now at age fifty-seven for different reasons, though the main one continues to be sheer admiration for Alba. My colleague Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez disputed in his article for the Alambique issue20 that Alba should be read as a feminist figure of empowerment, highlighting Pedrolo’s presentation of women in misogynistic circumstances in other novels. I still believe that Alba is indeed a figure of feminist empowerment, though it is certainly true that she concludes, seemingly like the author himself, that the key to humankind’s survival are her reproductive abilities, that is to say, her body, rather than her mind. My view is that whereas Alba quickly decides that she needs to have as many children as she can to regenerate Earth, her struggle to survive and the reformed human civilization that descends from her is the product of her progressive ideology.Just as Nilsson-Fernàndez resists Alba, some readers might resist Pedrolo’s presentation of child sexuality, for whereas Alba is sixteen when she first becomes pregnant, Dídac is barely twelve. Pedrolo mostly avoids erotic scenes but celebrates the natural eroticism that binds the couple, who do love each other but are also very much aware that fear or depression have no place in their project to be the new Adam and Eve. Other teens might despair, and adults commit suicide in the novel, but they persevere, scavenging what they need from the ruins of a devastated Barcelona, facing the few deranged remnants of humankind, and settling down to provide for their baby boy Mar (whom they give an epicene, nonbinary name). As, it is implied, the only humans who manage to survive and keep their sanity to build a family, they eventually construct a new post-racial, post-feminist, post-religion civilization, not without a terrible tragedy that leaves readers shaken even after many readings (as I can attest myself).To conclude, this is my personal invitation on behalf of the scholarly community of Catalan literature to readers of Utopian Studies who, because of our shared interests and scholarly commitments, might wish to discover a masterpiece which, as I have noted, should be acknowledged as a universal classic of dystopian literature, just as for instance Lord of the Flies is acknowledged as a classic of dystopian literature. I hope that you enjoy the English translation, and the scholarly work also available in English, and that one day, Pedrolo’s dystopia Totes les Bèsties de Càrrega and his other fine SF also find a way through translation into other nations beyond Catalonia.