2024-01-05 22:53:36
The writer Encarnación Aragoneses Urquijo, better known by her pseudonym Elena Fortún, created her most famous character at the beginning of the third decade of the 20th century. Her name is Celia and she is a girl with blonde curls who has a superpower more powerful than flying or going through walls: speaking with the voice of her readers. Her books are passed from generation to generation, tattered from being handled so much, with genuine enthusiasm on the part of the person who passed them on, who presents her as her best friend. That feeling of closeness caused some readers – especially women – to establish a pre-internet parasocial relationship with the author that has led to a detective community.
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The philologist professor at the University of Cádiz Marisol Dorao was the initiator, possibly unintentionally, of a network of researchers who discover unpublished works and unknown details of the writer for the enjoyment of her many followers. The most recent example is the book Elena and her friendsedited by the writer and professor of Theory of Literature, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Valencia, Purificación Mascarell.
This title is part of the Elena Fortún Library that the Renacimiento publishing house launched when it recovered the book Mila and Tweety in 2015. Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles and María Jesús Fraga, directors of the collection, gave a huge and pleasant surprise with the reissue, in 2016, of Celia in the revolutionthe Time.news of the Spanish Civil War that Until now it could only be found on the second-hand market. at prices that exceeded 100 euros.
The story of how that document came to light deserves a book of its own. It was Marisol Dorao who discovered it, in her incessant search through the world for the author’s unknown data – later she would tell them in her thesis. The thousand dreams of Elena Fortún–, among the papers that the writer’s daughter-in-law gave her in New York. The researcher traveled back to Spain hugging that invaluable suitcase, which also contained another novel of an autobiographical nature and aimed at adult readers entitled dark pathalso recovered by the Sevillian publisher.
The project of Elena and her friends He came to Mascarell through María Jesús Fraga. She had collected materials from people who had known the writer but she did not have time to give them shape so, as she knew that Mascarell had also begun to investigate the author, she gave them to him so that he could work on them and publish them. in Renaissance. This story would have been liked by Fortún herself, who was “such a friend of her friends, so much of female associations and mutual aid.” “We cannot forget that she began to write and publish because another woman encouraged her to do so, María de la O Lejárraga. Something similar happened to me with this project,” the editor tells elDiario.es.
A mosaic to rebuild
The volume, with a foreword by Manuela Carmena, is made up of seventeen texts written by personal acquaintances and scholars of Encarnación Aragoneses’ work between 1932 and 2001. Some are unpublished and others were published in out-of-print books or in magazines that no longer exist. Each one is preceded by a presentation of who signs the article and the reason for its inclusion in the book. Among other names appear those of José Luis Borau, Josefina Carabias, Matilde Ras, Carmen Conde or Francisco Nieva.
It was interesting to discover his friends from exile, the pedagogue María Concepción Cutanda, or his boss at the Buenos Aires library where he worked in the early forties.
Mascarell Purification — Publisher
Mascarell explains that he decided on this structure because once he had chosen, edited, and polished the texts, he thought it was necessary to give them a context. “They were like pieces of a mosaic that needed to be reconstructed for a modern reader,” he says. It was an exhaustive but satisfactory documentation process, as it could not be otherwise for one of the members of the detective battalion. “It was interesting to discover her friends from exile, the pedagogue María Concepción Cutanda, or her boss at the Buenos Aires library where she worked in the early 1940s, Francisco Luis Bernárdez,” declares Mascarell. Likewise, he mentions the illustrator Viera Sparza, who is not remembered enough in Spain despite the interesting nature of her figure and “her great supporter of her in the eighties and nineties: Carmen Martín Gaite,” he points out. .
The woman from Salamanca managed, together with Marisol Dorao and Felipe Mellizo, to Celia in the revolution It reached bookstores for the first time in 1987 from the Aguilar publishing house – the writer’s usual home – with illustrations by Asun Balzola. Likewise, she worked with José Luis Borau in the television adaptation of the character’s adventures which, in 1993, accompanied a reissue of several of the titles in the collection that were put on sale in newsstands. It was one of the peaks of the character’s popularity at the end of the 20th century.
Mascarell has especially enjoyed the two texts by Carmen Laforet, a writer who had a very close relationship with Fortún – whom she greatly admired – especially through correspondence. “I think sometimes when we talk about deceased people who we have loved and admired very much, we are actually talking about ourselves. This happens with Laforet if you read it carefully,” he says. And she has also had some surprises, such as discovering that, like almost all mortals, Encarnación had also failed her friends on some occasion.
This is the case of Inés Field, one of its pillars in Argentina, the country to which she went into exile after the Spanish Civil War with her husband Eusebio de Gorbea. In her text she tells how the writer suffered until arriving in Buenos Aires and her difficulties in continuing to write there, but also a fact that slightly obscures the figure of Fortún. “She was inspired (without asking permission) by the personal letters of her friend Inés to build the novel. Celia, governess in America. Although Field adored Elena, this bothered him deeply. Every friendship also contains painful passages,” says the editor.
These discoveries make it seem that the secrets hidden in Fortún’s biography have no end. For Mascarell, it is a characteristic of the classics and the writer should, if she is not already, considered “one of the great authors of children’s literature of the 20th century in all languages. As a professor of Comparative Literature, I believe that in Elena Fortún there is a vein to work on from comparatism,” she maintains.
Mascarell has recently published two other titles: the essay Written in the flesh. Literary corporalities of women (Tirant humanities) and the novel Mireia (Dos Bigotes), whose original edition in Valencian (Llibres de la Drassana) was the winner of the 2022 Premi Lletraferit de Novel·la. As a writer, she recognizes Fortún’s influence on her passion for the story as a literary genre. “Like Celia, I have always been fascinated by the wonderful stories of oral tradition, the fusion of literature with life, floating on the blurry boundary between fiction and reality, until both are confused… All this is in Mireia”, dice.
Furthermore, he has also left the mark of Fortún’s direct and artless phrases, so natural that they seem like those of a girl when it comes to Celia or those of a conversation on the level of reality when adults are speaking. “She has taught me that less is more, that you should always entertain the reader, keep him trapped, play with him, that intensity is the key. In Elena and her friends We discovered writers of the stature of Juan García Hortelano or Francisco Nieva joyfully admitting the literary influence of Fortún on them,” he comments.
A massive secret society
As with Tolkien fans or devotees of Star Wars, there is an invisible bond that unites Celia’s readers. When two people who barely know each other discover that they are admirers of Elena Fortún, an automatic mutual sympathy is generated (which may be fleeting but it is real). “It’s the magic of friendship. Elena has the gift, after death, of uniting the people who read her during their childhood. Is not it wonderful? Her adventures have the power to be recorded in the mind and remain associated with moments of plenitude, laughter and escape,” declares Mascarell. “I think we remember it so much, and we identify so much among the ‘celiac addicts’, because we were happy when we read it and we want to recover that happiness as adults by claiming it and making other generations of boys and girls know and appreciate it,” he concludes.
I think we remember it so much, and we identify so much among the ‘celiac addicts’, because we were happy when we read it and we want to recover that happiness as adults.
Mascarell Purification — Publisher
Carmen Laforet says in one of the texts that are collected in Elena and her friends, published in ABC in May 1954, that: “one day this month of May – the 8th – a group of writers met to remember Elena Fortún on the second anniversary of her death.” In this writing he advocates the construction of a statue of the writer, at the request of Matilde Ras (a friend and possible partner of Fortún), who imagines it in “the Retiro Rose Garden, where children play and flowers open.” That idea became a reality in 1957, with a mural made by José Planes in which the face of the writer is seen accompanied by Celia and her brother Cuchifritín with the inscription: “Spanish children to Elena Fortún, November 17, 1886 – May 8, 1952.”
María Jesús Fraga has continued with the tradition explained by the author of Anything, promoting several tribute meetings at the foot of the figure. Given the interest aroused by the reissues of Celia’s saga and the new discoveries made by Fortún’s network of tireless researchers, perhaps the time has come for a great meeting of ‘celiadicts’, as Mascarell says, who agrees with the idea. What happened at the event could constitute a new chapter of that book starring the Fortún detectives that someone should write one day.
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