Sender, the LOMLOE, and a Republican Suicide

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Andreu Navarra

In 1969, two strikingly different novels by Ramón J. Sender were published: on the one hand, En la vida de Ignacio Morel, a rather modest work — occasionally interesting — which earned him the Premio Planeta; and on the other, a masterpiece: Nocturno de los 14¹, an extraordinarily strange and visceral symphony, reissued last year by Amarillo publishing house with a foreword by Juan Marqués. The premise of this novel could not be more unsettling: a more or less autobiographical protagonist receives visits, in his lover’s house, from fourteen friends or acquaintances who have committed suicide. In a manner reminiscent of Richard III, these spectres appear before Pedro — the novel’s central figure — compelling him to confront his life and fears.

Some of these ghosts, such as Ernst Toller, Fabián Vidal, or Ernest Hemingway, are fairly well known. Others, like Helen Wilkinson — a British Minister of Culture whom Pedro presents as the frustrated love of his life — or a certain Ramón I.P., are less familiar. Yet their lives (and their suicides), narrated in a surreal atmosphere populated by roaming bison and overlapping guilt, remain deeply compelling.

The story of Ramón I.P. is particularly striking. A member of the prestigious Centre for Historical Studies, this suicidal figure was already harbouring self-destructive intentions when he insisted on being sent to the front lines in November 1936. He made this request to Sender, who at the time was part of the Fifth Regiment’s headquarters (“Lista, corner of Serrano”). Many years later, like Sender — or Pedro — Ramón I.P. managed to become a university professor, first in California and then in Wisconsin. However, it seems that this former combatant failed to adapt: “Ramón I.P. killed himself on a spring day when he realised that the freedoms in America were, for men like him, the freedoms of a bird within a cage. In France, a professor is a free spirit. Here, he is a bird with a bank account (savings and checkings) imprisoned in the cage of pedagogy. And furthermore, a bird without a song” (p. 239).

Spanish republican teachers also lack a song, much like the suicidal Ramón I.P. We have been subjected to the bureaucratic banality imported from the United States — a country where competency-based reforms (far more established there, having emerged in the 1950s) long ago turned public schools into ghettos or non-places. This, it seems, is what pedagogists in Europe have sought to replicate over the past two decades, mirroring the worst aspects of the American giant. Even French teachers can no longer be free spirits, trapped as they are in the nightmare of competency networks designed to manufacture inequality and conceal budget cuts.

If we remain sceptical, let us examine how strikingly relevant these words of Sender sound today. They could have been written yesterday, but they date back to 1968 — and they referred to the American, not the Spanish, reality: “En general, la cultura nos da libertad. En este país la cultura reduce esa libertad a las estrechas normas de un sentido positivo de la ciudadanía, es decir que la convierte en un instrumento de servidumbre. No porque exista una disciplina en ese sentido ni un plan preconcebido, sino porque la mente del profesor se formó ya en esa clase de sometimiento y no ha salido ni saldrá probablemente de él” (p. 240). (“In general, culture grants us freedom. In this country, culture reduces that freedom to the narrow rules of a positive sense of citizenship, turning it into an instrument of servitude. Not because there is a discipline in that sense or a preconceived plan, but because the professor’s mind was already shaped by that kind of subjugation and has neither escaped nor likely ever will”). The American state needed genetically submissive teachers, ideologically conditioned, immunised against speculation and imagination — serial preachers, mass producers of righteous, right-thinking citizens. The country that adopted Sender needed to produce automatons, not educate, and to achieve this, it imposed a kind of educational neo-Taylorism — one we are now mimicking.

This explains why “cuando Ramón I.P. se dio cuenta de eso empezó a descorazonarse. No lo trataban como al espíritu libre y creador que era, sino como a un autómata que se ponía delante de la clase y repetía el evangelio laico que marca el calendario. Entonces se dio cuenta Ramón I.P. de que respiraba bien, pero sin provecho alguno visible para nadie, ni siquiera para sí mismo. Peligroso descubrimiento” (pág. 241). (“when Ramón I.P. realised this, he began to lose heart. He was not treated as the free and creative spirit he was, but as an automaton standing before the class, repeating the secular gospel dictated by the calendar. Then Ramón I.P. realised that, while he was breathing, it served no visible purpose for anyone — not even for himself. A dangerous discovery”. In other words, Ramón I.P. could no longer teach anything. Because only vocational bureaucrats — pedagogical robots armed with their mantras and nihilistic creed — could adapt to such a bureaucratised context.

I recently completed a course on Occupational Hazards, mandatory for complying with the law at the start of any new job. In the section on psychosocial risks, it warned that a potential “lack of meaning” in work activities is one of the leading causes of anxiety and depression. This is something our legislators and regulators fail to grasp: a bureaucratised education, reduced to the repetition of a “secular gospel”, fuels the depression not only of teachers but also of a large portion of students. We need “meaning”, not “faith”. Life lies elsewhere — in freedom and culture — precisely what poor R.I.P. lacked on that spring day when he decided to hang himself.

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¹ Ramón J. Sender’s novels En la vida de Ignacio Morel and Nocturno de los 14 have not been translated into English. Therefore, the quotes provided here are free translations of the original texts.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons