Blood and Song: Creative Forms in Exile for Mourning the Dead in the 1950s

The widowed Ramón Sender, who arrived in the United States in March of 1939 with his two small children, rarely directly broached the topic of his wife’s death. However, two of his most revealing creative works of the 1950s may be productively read as “histories of mourning.” The urgency of such novelistic testimonies like Mosén Millán (1953) and Los cinco libros de Ariadna (1957), both published in multiple editions outside of Spain in Mexico and the United States, is best understood within the context of the early post-World War II years. Exiled Spanish Republican leaders campaigned for Western democracies to destabilize Franco’s regime, following the fall of the Caudillo’s fascist allies. Franco’s fate initially seemed to be sealed by global measures such as the UN’s 1946 diplomatic boycott of Spain; the 1947 decision to exclude Spain from the Marshall Plan; and the 1949 refusal to admit Spain to the newly founded NATO. The Cold War thaw in the early 1950s, however, brought Franco increasingly into the Western democracies’ fold. I argue that a significant facet of the exiles’ efforts to maintain pressure on the international community was—in addition to Sender’s novels—other 1950s discursive representations of Franco’s atrocities. Once again, the murdered body serves the antifascist artist as a powerful rhetorical instrument to convince readers beyond Spain that the victims of Franco’s war and postwar crimes still await justice during the first decades after 1939.