Reading from rupture. A teorethical proposal for the political potential of an interrupted literary genealogy

Abstract

This article aims to elaborate a theoretical proposal that allow us to discover the political potential of an interrupted literary genealogy: that of the political and social novel of the thirties and fifties in Spain, joining their apparently disconnected points, in terms of Walter Benjamin, in a constellation. Likewise, and following the Althusserian theory of knowledge, this article does not aim to describe its subject of study but also to produce a new place, radically other, to transform it into a new knowledge. In order to do so, I propose to read this literature—that I define as literature from below— from the rupture. I explore four ruptures in order to read this interrupted genealogy: 1) from the interruption that compels the project of political literature to start from scratch, without an archive of accumulated experience for emancipation; 2) from the cracks that this literature opens up in the wall of historicism, challenging the narrative of power and claiming the place of the subaltern classes in the history; 3) from the break with the ideology of literature, seeking a new discourse of emancipation, beyond the literary form; 4) from the rupture that we experience today, from the transition to democracy to the present, as readers without a repertory of literary voices to think the emancipation. Finally, this article proposes the necessity to build an archive –in the Foucauldian sense– not only to catalogue this forgotten literature, but also make it legible in an ideological sense.