The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian

By E.F. Granell

Written by Galician surrealist artist and revolutionary E.F. Granell, The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian is a picaresque, Cervantes-influenced allegory of the Spanish Civil War. Set against a cruel landscape peopled by generals, priests, conquistadors, poets, witches, and nuns, Tupinamba Indian embodies Granell's wartime experiences while transforming them through his lush and incendiary surrealist imagination.

Praise for The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian:

"In an ever-shifting world populated by nameless, iconic stock figures, the Tupinamba Indian (whose head, slashed off by a conquistador, remains detachable/attachable in a brilliant metaphor for colonialism) wanders, stumbles, and thrives in a war landscape where time and space morph. … A war novel, a political allegory not only of the late '30s but also our current political moment …"—Gillian Conoley

"Granell's Tupinamba Indian magnificently registers the author's experience with the didactic inferno of war and his ability to imaginatively ascend above it."—Will Alexander

"An exceptional sense of humor filters through [Granell's] war experience, fleecing expectations and convictions, and freeing him to levitate this personal and collective history into a madcap romp through a violated landscape. Where tragedy emerges with the Fascist victory, prologue to World War Two, laughter curdles its edges then burns it up. … No group is sacrosanct, no one beyond reproach, priests, intellectuals, and leader (aka Franco, our 'tiny Grand Turk'), included."—Allan Graubard, co-editor of Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America - An Untold Story

Artist, writer, musician, socialist, professor, and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Eugenio F. Granell (1912-2001) was one of the leading figures of the post-World War II international surrealist movement.

Translator David Coulter is an artist who currently divides his time between Berkeley, CA and Coimbra, Portugal, where he particpates with the Cabo Mondego Section of Portuguese Surrealism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Release date: Jan 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780872867758

Book preview

PREFACE

E. F. GRANELL

by Benjamin Péret

Translated by Franklin Rosemont

At the height of a cry: Such is the expression of an anonymous Mayan author who wished to underline the fact that tradition, in spite of its antiquity, still moves him with all its intensity. Beyond all doubt, the cry of E. F. Granell owes its particular sonority as much to the circumstances under which it was uttered as to the locales in which it was produced.

Is it by mere chance that this fighter in the Spanish Workers’ Militia, who sought refuge in France after the revolution was crushed, went on to repeat Columbus’ first voyage? From Santo Domingo, following the trail of the conquistadores of the sixteenth century, he settled for a time in Guatemala, from which country Stalinism drove him exactly as Franco had driven him from Spain. Then his migration took him to Puerto Rico, which had been one of the last colonial possessions retained by his homeland after the emancipation of the West Indies.

But I suspect that all this wandering has been for Granell only the material base of a very different kind of exploration, just as the earth supports the tree that searches the air from which it entices the songs of birds. And in this voyage, in which chance replaces the compass, Granell, like every authentic artist, has made for himself a sun that is visible only to those who watch for it. This sun is now emitting its early morning rays.

At the height of a cry…. That cry which, beginning in Europe, wakes all the echoes of the Caribbean Sea, did not overlook in its journey material to enrich its vibrations. Of course, the original Spain is transcendent in every one of Granell’s works, but can’t attempts at hybridization already be discerned? The beings he presents to us seem to have emerged from an as yet undiscovered world. Are these forms from another age, another place to which he leads us? These specimens of a future fauna—solar rooster-compass, sewing-machine-chicken—cannot help but evoke the fabulous beings that the first voyagers recognized in America, such as the drawing-brush bird (pacho del cielo) of which Samuel Champlain¹ offers us an image devoid of feet because, he tells us, it nourished itself from the air and never rested anywhere.

It is understandable, then, that Granell has at times felt the need to place the results of his passionate hunt in the forbidden forests of continents still to be discovered—forests in which he finds his pleasure. Alone in his refuges, following fleeting images, has he not wanted to enjoy the leisure to know them better?

At the height of a cry…. Granell’s bursts forth from the great depths where mystical beings are created. Yet it comes to us so clearly that it seems to have been uttered right here. And that is because the height of this cry is that of the man himself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The translator would like to express his gratitude to Natalia Fernández Segarra, daughter of Eugenio Granell and Amparo Segarra, not only for granting permission to translate The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian but also for her generosity and patience in answering many questions about the life of Eugenio Granell. In addition, Ms. Segarra provided invaluable access to the research facilities at the Fundación Granell in Santiago de Compostela.

A special thank you to my wife, Kate Kirkhuff, for her encouragement and expertise throughout this lengthy project. Allan Graubard was instrumental in helping to initiate this project by introducing me to Natalia Segarra. In addition, Mr. Graubard’s readings and comments have further enhanced the text. A special thank you to Penelope Rosemont for providing Franklin Rosemont’s translation of the preface by Benjamin Péret.

Further thanks are due Beatriz Hausner, Ezra E. Fitz, Will Alexander, Camila Loew, Andrew Joron, and James Brook for offering to read the translation at various stages of its development. Thank you to Rik Lina whose painting, Tupinamba, the Red Poet, is a marvelous inspiration and reminder of Granell’s influence on post-World War II surrealism. Thank you to Emma Styles-Swaim for her translations from Latin.

Finally, a tip of the hat to Garrett Caples at City Lights Publishing whose support and guidance for this project was invaluable.

INTRODUCTION TO

THE NOVEL OF THE TUPINAMBA INDIAN

"[T]he major surrealist novel of the Spanish Civil War…. in the first place because the surrealism of Granell does not seem, like others, a learned technique, but something spontaneous, so in tune with his temperament and way of being that it is impossible to imagine it being written any other way."

— Vicente Llorens (Princeton University, 1957)

The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian is at one and the same time a political novel, a war novel, and a novel of exile and colonialism. With mordant wit it depicts in a succession of episodes a world that is both familiar and strange, where normalcy is torn asunder to reveal a cruel landscape populated by gypsies, academics, generals, witches, and megalomaniacal leaders. Musician, artist, writer, teacher, and political activist, Granell was no armchair revolutionary. He participated in socialist and revolutionary organizations beginning in 1928 while a student in Madrid, fought with both left-communist and anarchist brigades in the civil war, and was exiled from Spain for 46 years during the Francoist dictatorship. He continued his activism in exile, aiding Republican exile organizations and writing for the New York City-based anti-Franco journal España Libre.¹ His journey through the Caribbean and Guatemala exposed him to the boundless magic of tropical nature: savage, bloody, chaotic, and beautiful all at once. In Latin America he encountered the repercussions of Spanish colonialism: military coups and dictatorial regimes, domination by the European caste, oppression of the indigenous populations. But the power of colonialism for Granell was countered by a deep appreciation of indigenous and Creole culture. The Spanish Civil War provides its main setting, yet The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian could not have been written without Granell’s encounter with the Caribbean. His war experience fighting for the revolutionary socialist side—defeated by both the Fascists and doctrinaire communists—combines with his exile in a post-colonial New World to depict in the novel "A decomposed expression of an incongruent world, hardly just and nothing human."

Orginal frontispiece: The Tupinamba Indian (left), author of this novel, with the editor (right).

In The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian, a kaleidoscopic achronological vision of conflict, war, and exile is tempered by humor, and a poignancy derived from Granell’s experiences of humanity in its most extreme and precarious situations. The novel stands in the Spanish tradition of Granell’s beloved Cervantes, or the etchings of Francisco Goya (Disasters of War). Granell presents a picaresque tale of a Tupinamba Indian (who we are told by the title is the author of the novel) visiting civilized Spain which is now in the throes of its own barbarism, a civil war. Reinforcing the title, the orginal frontispiece of the novel provides accompanying photographs of the author and editor, in full Tupinamba Indian garb. It is as if an indigenous chief, brought to the sixteenth century royal court of Ferdinand and Isabella, to be put on display, reversed the role of observed and observer and was documenting the customs of the civilized Europeans. As the Tupinamba Indian says to the General in the chapter, The Tupinamba Indian Pays the General a Visit, I came from the Americas to see the land of the Conquistadors and I find everybody training one another in their centuries-old struggles.

Early in the Tupinamba Indian’s travels, he discovers that while the people "only wanted to live in freedom and dignity… that the beds not have bedbugs, nor rats in the factories, nor scurvy in newborns, nor did they want the houses to be crawling with spiders … they did not want to go to court, and then to prison, for the simple fact of protesting that they weren’t pack mules," the ruling class supported by the army responds forcefully: "military bigwigs, together with the aristocrats, the landowners, the bankers and the playboys" answered with "Airplanes [which] dropped bombs that smashed schools, gardens, museums, and orphanages."² Spain would become the rehearsal for the greater convulsion of the Second World War.

In 1941 Granell, now exiled to the Dominican Republic, had a crucial encounter in Santo Domingo (renamed Ciudad Trujillo by dictator’s decree in 1936) with André Breton, who, with his family, was fleeing France and Martinique. As a result of this meeting Granell became an active participant in the surrealist movement, until his death in 2001. In flight from both Fascism and Stalinism, Granell found in surrealism the reconciliation of Marx (Change the world) and Rimbaud (Change life)—or as Eugenio wrote, "the intersection of empirical experience with the intimate …"

The influence of fellow Galician writer, Ramon del Valle-Inclán, master of the esperpento,³ is apparent in the novel’s depiction of the war-shattered mirror of Spain. The characters of The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian are nameless beings, ready-made stock figures, reduced to an emblematic status—the Tupinamba Indian, the Priest, the Conquistador, the General, the Bishop, the Grand Turk—wandering a war landscape. In the Western Republic of Carajá, where Spanish refugees are exiled, successive military coups are resolved by means of "a decree by means of which the deposed general proceeded automatically to be called by the name of the triumphant general and the triumphant general would, reciprocally, from then on, use the name of the exonerated general." However, as this maneuver fails, it is decided, "To resolve the mess, it was fitting to shoot both generals against a wall, not without having restored to them their respective names, by means of a decree which annulled the effect of previous decrees."⁴ Using a dispassionate tone, the author describes a society ruled by interchangeable names and faces, subject only to the law of power.

André Breton and Eugenio Granell. Sto. Domino, 1941.

Readers might assume that certain passages in the novel are satires of political speeches taken to their illogical conclusions. In the chapter, Squeals of Joy, when the dictator, the Grand Turk "situated … in the precise center of the three thick rings of fecal stench," delivers a speech before a crowd in Burgos—"Now, in this world, all of the children of sin and filth, all of the sons of bitches and bastards, all of the bandoliered ruffians have joined together, against the ancient stones of our only true home"—his words are met with "hysterical shrieks" from the assembled crowd. Compare this with these words from Víctor Ruiz Albeniz, a close friend of Franco’s, who wrote an article demanding that Barcelona needed, a biblical punishment [Sodom and Gomorrah] to purify the red city, seat of anarchism and separatism, as the only remedy to extirpate these two cancers by implacable thermocauterization.⁵ Such was the level of discourse in pre-war and Civil War Spain. Early morning executions of Republican prisoners attracted large crowds, and with them stalls selling hot chocolate and churros.⁶ Spectators at these executions would remind their friends not to miss the next day’s spectacle. For Granell, like his comrade George Orwell, language is an infinitely malleable faculty, capable of the most beautiful creations, but also an instrument of obfuscation and social control.

Granell was a student of history but The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian refuses to follow a linear path, shattering laws of time and space. The Tupinamba Indian easily travels from Spain to the Western Republic of Carajá and back in the blink of an eye. In Chapter 20, The Grand National Celebration, after a sojourn in Carajá, "The Tupinamba Indian … took the stagecoach and traveled between harness bells and bottles of anís once again to Spain, to see what remained of that country from the war." The chapters in which Don Secundino, Lucas, his manservant, and the witches appear, take place in a setting that is at once a mansion, a wardrobe, and an embassy.

In the chapter, The Scientific-Moral Machine, Granell, perhaps taking a cue from Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, portrays a scientific project undertaken by the Fascists, in which "to verify the proper functioning of the mechanism, the most illustrious cadavers in the history of the country should be utilized." The machine, constructed behind the Academy, is designed to do away with sexual intercourse, in order to "considerably reduce, and if possible, end once and for all, the scandalous propagation of carnal knowledge." The chapter’s tableau vivant may also remind one of Duchamp’s Bachelor Machine and The Harrow, the justice-dispensing apparatus in Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony.

In 1960, for the New York City exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter’s Domain, organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, Granell was grouped along with other artists under the figure of Prospero, the exiled magus of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Like Prospero, Eugenio is banished from his homeland, endowed with prodigious powers of creation, and resists an unjust regime. The life of Eugenio Granell incarnates the experience of many Spaniards of his generation who moved through the twentieth century from a feudal society to the promise of socialism, the subsequent reaction of a fascist military coup, civil war, the exile of hundreds of thousands of Republicans, and almost four decades of fascist dictatorship. The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian allows Granell, through the Tupinamba Indian, to exact a species of revenge against those forces that set him adrift, while drawing trenchant comparisons between the supposedly civilized Europeans and the indigenous Caribbeans.

Marcel Duchamp and E.F. Granell in New York City.

Biography: 1912–1928

Eugenio Fernández Granell was born in 1912 in La Coruña, Spain in the northwest province of Galicia. Soon after Eugenio’s birth the Granell family moved from La Coruña to Santiago de Compostela, Galicia’s capital.

Galicia is a land rich in qualities associated with Celtic culture, with its own language, Galician (closer to Portuguese than Spanish). Ancient traditions of mythical beings and witchcraft survived into the twentieth century. In a letter to Gerardo Piña, Granell wrote, "I listened to stories of these creatures by the light of the fireplace in winter, stories of ghosts, witches and the Santa Compaña,⁷ things which Galicia is full of, as one finds in agrarian lands."⁸ Witches make an appearance in Tupinamba in the chapter, Brief Witch’s Sabbath. Flying up from their world under Don Secundino’s wardrobe, they attempt to exorcise the malaise of the fugitive Secundino and his visitor, The Priest.

Young Eugenio was also deeply affected by the festivals and celebrations still common in Spain. In his Memories of Compostela Granell describes watching from his house, "sacred and profane parades, absurd masks from the time of the week preceding Lent…" Among the more memorable for Granell were Gigantes and Cabezudos (Giants and Big-Heads), parading through the streets. "The Giants marched separately, carried by men invisible, but for the feet… " For the burgeoning artist-poet, "Giants and Big-Heads were monstrous incarnations of the human canvas, as are all masks."⁹

Vestiges of the ancient past can be found throughout the Galician landscape. From prehistoric cave paintings to megalithic standing stones and dolmens to Celto-Iberian castros to Roman bridges and fortifications, the distant past is present. Prehistoric and medieval art made a lasting impression on him, as he writes in Memories, "I know of no painting more eloquently imagined than that of the medieval saints, or those traced in the darkness of the caves and by magic hunters from the most remote antiquity."¹⁰

Deeply rooted in Galician folklore is the festival of the generals (os Xenerais), when costumed figures come face to face near the end of Carnival to produce the arranque—a war of wits using subtle and clever dialogues as their weapons. Such a verbal combat occurs in Chapter 5, The Indio Tupinamba Pays the General a Visit, where Tupinamba exposes the General’s ignorance. Tupinamba rightly comments: "There are many errors in history. As if that were not enough, there are many who want to increase them." And, asked by the General, "Do you not wage wars over there?" Tupinamba answers, Few and small.

Granell, his brother Mario, and their friends developed an early interest in art. Eugenio was drawn to the fantastic: "What I painted most prodigiously in my childhood were imaginary castles for which I invented some strange epic." Eugenio often populated his imaginary world with characters from Don Quixote and the legends of Bécquer.¹¹

The Little House on the Mount, 1950. Chinese ink on paper, 30 x 23 cm.

Along with his brothers Mario and Julio, Eugenio studied music. Eugenio played the violin seriously enough that he intended to become a professional musician. He received instruction in classical music but became an aficionado and player of jazz and tango.

"a group of friends decided to form a jazz orchestra, knowing that this meant a band of black North Americans. I imagine that this was the first intrusion in the monotony of Galician life, the musical power from the United States arriving with the marvelous inventiveness of African origin."¹²

For Granell, and countless others, "The popularity of cinema constituted the great innovation of our time." His father was a small businessman who owned a cinema in Noia, west of Santiago. The chapter Refugees’ Zeal in The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian depicts Civil War refugees, now living in the Western Republic of Carajá, after working all day, watching an absurd Western which they don’t enjoy because "There were no bullfights nor anything like that; more over not a single war scene." Decades later Granell became a filmmaker after receiving the gift of a camera.

Biography: 1928–1936

Although Spain prospered from its neutrality during WWI, selling weapons to both sides, it remained a country fraught with social, economic, and political inequality. In the south the latifundia system kept peasants in feudal conditions. The Church was complicit in maintaining the status quo.

From 1920–26, Spain fought the Rif War, an uprising by Berbers of the Rif Mountains, led by Abd al-Karim, in the Spanish North African colonies. The Spanish military dropped bombs and chemical weapons on Moroccan villages. Spanish casualties were estimated at over 40,000. Throughout the 1920s, Spanish peasants and workers frequently engaged in revolts and land occupations. Taking advantage of chaos at home and abroad, the military dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera, seized power in 1923 and abolished the Constitution, although he did not dethrone King Alfonso XIII. Additionally, Spain’s two most prosperous provinces, Catalonia and the Basque country, were demanding autonomy if not independence. By 1930, Primo de Rivera had lost the support of the military and aristocracy and resigned. In 1931 King Alfonso XIII fled the country. The first elections in nearly 60 years were held. The Socialists (PSOE) won a clear majority and the Second Spanish Republic was declared.

In 1928 Granell moved to Madrid where he enrolled in the Escuela Superior de Música, studying violin and composition. He was soon participating in student agitation and began collaborating on the magazine Nueva España (New Spain). At the urging of his friend Juan Andrade, Granell joined the Left Opposition which later became the Izquierda Communista (Communist Left), an anti-Stalinist communist party.

Untitled (Indian Head), 1945. Watercolor on cardboard, 13 x 12.5 cm.

The leftist movements in Spain were inextricably linked to events in the Soviet Union. In 1927 at the XVth Party Congress in Moscow, the Left Opposition which included Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev, was declared incompatible with membership in the Communist Party, consolidating Stalin’s power and eventual dictatorship. By 1929 Trotsky was exiled and much of the old Bolshevik leadership decimated. Granell’s Izquierda Comunista was allied with this outlawed Left Opposition in the Soviet Union.

In 1933 Granell began attending the tertulia¹³ that was held in the cafe Granja el Henar, led by Rafael and Eduardo Dieste. It was in this cafe that Eugenio became fascinated by two posters of Tupinamba Indians advertising a brand of coffee. Coincidentally, several years after the writing of this novel, Granell came across a volume of the Smithsoniania which was an extensive study of the Tupinamba Indians, written by Alfred Matraux¹⁴, whose brother knew Granell at the University of Puerto Rico.

In 1934 Granell was drafted into the Spanish military, serving in the province of Asturias where miners had mounted a revolution against the Republic. Granell refused to participate in a firing squad directed against a group of miners, and was sentenced to death. Awaiting execution, Eugenio was fortunate that the commanding officer was General Rogelio Caridad Pita, a loyal Republican, who agreed with his refusal to participate in the firing squad. Pita arranged to have the door of Granell’s cell left unlocked, facilitating his escape. Unfortunately, General Pita was later executed by the Fascists in the early months of the Civil War.¹⁵ In Chapter 14 of The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian, Before the Firing Squad Wall, Granell depicts an escape from a firing squad, but by means of the Tupinamba Indian’s magical ability to remove and reattach his head in order to evade the bullets.

In 1935, Granell joined comrades from the Left Opposition and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc to form the Partido Unido Obrero Marxista (POUM).¹⁶ It was led by the Catalan Andreu Nin, who had served as secretary to Leon Trotsky during the Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war. Granell edited the POUM magazine El Combatiente Rojo and participated in other POUM publications, including POUM, La Nueva Era, and the party newspaper La Batalla.

The ruling Socialists had instituted sweeping progressive legislation: land reform, freedom of speech and association, women’s right to vote and to divorce, abolition of special legal status