2023-10-14 22:26:58
Since the publishing house Hoja de Lata rescued the novel in 2016 Tea rooms. working women, by Luisa Carnés, has done nothing but achieve success. In addition to already accumulating sixteen editions and more than 25,000 copies sold – as well as a commemorative editionwith epilogue by Marta Sanz–, Tea rooms It has been adapted to the theater by Laia Ripoll and has become mandatory reading in one of the reading itineraries proposed by the commonly called Celaá law. As if that were not enough, RTVE has just premiered the soap opera La Moderna Tea Room, an adaptation of Carnés’ novel, during after-dinner hours.
The recovery of Luisa Carnés’s work is an act of justice and literary reparation, and everything that contributes to its recognition, dissemination and socialization cannot but be celebrated. However, the way in which such recovery is taking place distances, and sometimes neutralizes, the political meaning of Carnés’s novel. First of all, it has been commonplace to announce the author of Tea rooms as the forgotten novelist of the – misnamed – ‘generation of ’27’.
It is true that Carnés shared his time with the poets of ’27, but his place of enunciation was radically other; Theirs is a working-class and revolutionary literature, a ‘literature from below’, written from exploitation and against exploitation. This literature occupied a different position within the literary field. If the literature of ’27 had among its organs of dissemination of its pure and autonomous poetics the Western Magazine, the social-revolutionary literature published in the Oriente publishing house. The image could not be clearer nor the compass more precise. Carnés and her literature occupied a different place and in conflict with the dominant poetics to which he now wants to ascribe it.
Continuing to read Carnés as the ‘forgotten writer of the generation of ’27’ means placing her in the wrong place and denying her the conditions of readability that would make it possible to understand her work as literature. otherdesigned and built from a place other, different from the place from which literature has always been written: bourgeois ideology and culture. Recovery by itself is worthless: not only must the text be recovered but the legibility conditions that give it meaning must be restored. This is what is not happening. Nor with the television adaptation of Tea rooms, or at least that is the conclusion that we can provisionally draw once we have seen the first episodes broadcast.
It is not necessary to allow much time to pass to begin to detect symptoms of the depoliticization that is taking place. To begin with, the plot is set in Madrid in 1930. Before, then, the proclamation of the Republic. This temporal displacement is curious and perhaps we will have to wait a few more episodes to find the answer that explains it. But it is striking, since one of the most historically interesting aspects of Tea rooms is that it describes, from the perspective of a working-class woman, Republican Spain as a political place in conflict.
This vision moves away from the later elaborations that would be made from Franco’s historiography, which seeks to draw a Republic as synonymous with chaos to legitimize a coup d’état that would pacify and restore order to the country, but also from the idyllic image of a Republic. bourgeois, of teachers, poets and intellectuals, which is threatened and trapped by extremes that touch each other. The Republic of Carnés is neither chaotic nor ideal, but conflictive and crossed by a class struggle.
As a working-class and revolutionary novel, Tea rooms explains the conflicts from the class struggle. In The modern, social antagonism is conspicuous by its absence. If in Carnés’s novel the social position of individuals is determined by a structure of exploitation, which divides the world into two halves, between those who own the means of production and those who make them function with their labor force, establishing a relationship among them that it cannot be anything other than conflictive, in the television series the reality of exploitation is displaced in favor of an image in which conflicts are reconciled and harmonized.
The character of the owner of the tea room, as a good boss, understanding and fair, but not charitable (the salary must be deserved), fulfills that harmonizing function, which makes the tea room a space free of class struggle. The conflict is suspended, and only a few frictions arise between a too severe manager and Matilde, the protagonist, who sometimes – but not too often – is overly responsive, as the manager points out. The Matilda of Tea roomshowever, is not a protester: she is class conscious and consequently speaks, acts and mobilizes for the emancipation of working women from the structure of capitalist exploitation.
Unlike Matilde de Carnés, that of The modern She is not exploited, she is a woman with economic problems that are the result of misfortune, bad luck, an accident. When she was a teenager, Matilde de The modern He witnesses the death of his father, who was run over while walking down the street. With this accident begins a plot more typical of a nineteenth-century soap opera starring a poor orphan who has to survive the hardship that the death of her father leaves her with. Matilde has to occupy the patriarchal place left vacant by her dead father and move her family forward, with her effort and perseverance. Difficult for a woman of her time – as is constantly emphasized – but the image of the modern woman will end up imposing itself on reality.
One of the most historically interesting aspects of Tea Rooms is that it describes, from the perspective of a working-class woman, Republican Spain as a political place in conflict.
She looks for work and finally finds it at the La Moderna tea room, thanks to the benevolence of the good boss, who hires her despite the disapproval of the manager. It seems that life is beginning to smile at her, but her landlord is running out of patience and demands that this fatherless family immediately pay the rent arrears. A charitable gesture from an upper-class client who frequents the tea room allows Matilde to have the money she would have to avoid eviction. However, she has the envelope containing the money stolen on the subway when she comes across a workers’ strike whose demands the series does not make explicit.
This scene is crucial to understanding the meaning of the series as opposed to the novel. The strike has a negative meaning in the plot and ends up causing the eviction of the protagonist and her family. While in the next chapter, another merciful rich man will rent his house to them and the conflict will be harmonized again thanks to the generosity of those above, the strike reinforces the unfortunate story, based on bad luck, of the protagonist. In Tea rooms, the strike is a mechanism of social response and does not interfere in Matilde’s life as something foreign and pernicious; Matilda of Tea rooms would support the strike.
The reconstruction of space also fulfills the ideological function of overshadowing exploitation in the series. Although some scenes show the improvised wardrobe of the tea room employees in an old, dirty warehouse full of bedbugs – as happens in the novel – the Italian pastry chef’s workshop draws attention. In the novel he goes blind from working in a kind of basement without natural light. In the series, natural light enters through windows that overlook the patio of the property. The traces of exploitation on the body – painful, destroyed – so present in the novel, barely have an echo in a series where in reality little work is represented and a lot of the back room (where gossip anticipates the entanglements that will come).
In ‘Tea rooms’, the strike is a mechanism of social response and does not interfere in Matilde’s life as something foreign and pernicious; Matilde from ‘Tea rooms’ would support the strike
The place of exploitation becomes a space where it is possible to realize the dream of love. The melodramatic overtones of the series are completed with the title song, performed by Pastora Soler. The Matilda of The modern She reunites with a childhood friend, but those young people now occupy very different social positions: she is a clerk in the tea room, while he is the right hand of a great businessman who owns the gallery in which the tea Room. Surely some entanglements will arise here, but what is interesting to observe is that Matilde, like a naive character in a romantic and sentimental novel, falls romantically in love with this incarnation of a period film heartthrob. The falling in love of the television Matilde contrasts with the speeches against romantic love and marriage as an institution of the Matilde in Luisa Carnés’s novel, which describes and denounces them as mechanisms of patriarchal domination that prevent the emancipation of women. On TV, however, and as the verses in the song’s chorus say, “in La Moderna, love is always possible.” But not exploitation, it seems, always overshadowed or harmonized in the audiovisual story.
Slavoj Žižek said, in one of his famous jokes, that postmodernity constantly offers us, as signifiers emptied of meaning, products where the real thing that constitutes them has been eliminated, such as coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol or ice cream without sugar. . To which we could add: and History without historicity. Indeed, and as Fredric Jameson said, one of the characteristics that defines postmodernity is the liquidation of historicity; This is understood as conflict and contradiction, as class struggle. In The modern historicity has been liquidated and in it the tea is served without theine, lest we get on our nerves and begin to think of ourselves historically and try to search in the world for what is real about exploitation. It is better to repress that vision and continue seeing ourselves imaginarily. free, and perhaps a little responsive, that there will always be someone merciful enough to give us a tip. The class struggle has been suppressed.
#politically #deactivate #Tea #rooms #workingclass #revolutionary #Luisa #Carnés #adapt #television