Ernesto Hernández Busto: "The reactionary writer shows us the hidden side of progress"

Cuban writer, journalist and translator, exiled in Spain since 1999 and based in Barcelona, Ernesto Hernández Busto tackles in Mito y revuelta. Physiognomies of the writer...

Cuban writer, journalist and translator, exiled in Spain since 1999 and based in Barcelona,

Ernesto Hernández Busto

tackles in

Mito y revuelta.
Physiognomies of the reactionary writer

(Turner), an expanded and updated edition of the book that won the Casa América essay prize in 2004, the collective portrait of a series of writers from the interwar period, such as

Ernst Jünger

Ezra Pound

Ernesto Giménez Caballero

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

, cursed, reactionary, anti-modern and in many cases idolized pens, which in his opinion outline the "right-wing intellectual" in Europe.

You maintain that one can speak of a right-wing literature... As a literary or stylistic model, the spectrum is too wide to be reduced to that definition: a writer like Ezra Pound, for example, has little to do with another like Montherlant.

On the other hand, as an intellectual model, there are common elements that allow us to speak of the right-wing writer.

Each of the authors that appear in this book is projected as a fragment of a larger model, which would serve to define the reactionary intellectual.

What characterizes them?

He is someone who does not believe in progress, who exalts myth, who has a complex relationship with the past and with his own time.

That is explained very well by Antoine Compagnon in

The Anti-Moderns

(Cliff), where he goes on to say in a few words that the French writers of the 19th century and the interwar period, such as Baudelaire, Bloy or Péguy, are more modern than those we usually describe as modern artists.

Because they are authors who know the revolution well and teach the hidden side of supposed progress.

Quoting Thibaudet, Compagnon affirms that during the French Third Republic, that moment in which France is politically modernizing, the conservative impulse is transferred from politics to literature, with the two guardian angels of the right that are Chateaubriand and De Maistre.

From 1870 to 1940 almost all the important writers in France were conservative, reactionary, anti-progress.

The great contribution and lucidity of the reactionary author is to show how the revolution can become its opposite.

An intellectual paradigm that lasts until today?

The Dreyfus case called him into question, made the intellectual emerge as an anti-right-wing hero and that idea endures to this day.

In recent decades the landscape has changed a bit.

For example, the model of the Spanish intellectual was someone like Semprún or Alberti, but now much more attention is paid to writers who were not active in the anti-Franco regime.

There is a fundamental book, which changed the perception of Spanish literature in this sense, which is Las Armas y las Letras, by Andrés Trapiello.

An essay that modifies literary understanding in Spain.

Although little is still read of Ruano, Sánchez Mazas or Foxá, writers who did read the anti-modernists and who,

like them, they did not want to abandon the Tradition.

You, among these Spanish authors, choose Ernesto Giménez Caballero in your book... His camp side caught my attention.

That eccentric side that only the avant-garde could contribute: despite being the very incarnation of the façade, it also had a fundamental role in the artistic avant-garde.

He was a renovator of the Spanish culture between the wars.

Giménez Caballero's writing in some books is absolutely experimental, comparable at times to Breton or the Futurists.

He was a perfect opportunist, with a great talent for capturing the spirit of the times.

Also, he is very funny, irresistibly comical.

In his essay, you state that anti-Semitism is a common characteristic of reactionary writers... It is a common element among writers from different countries,

It includes the Russian Vasili Rózanov, little known in Spain, or the Céline of the pamphlets, or the Mexican Vasconcelos.

The Jew characterized certain discomforts, the need to sacrifice, as a sacrificial figure, to a representation of rootlessness.

But there is something else.

Céline goes so far as to say that he is "the Jew of the Jews".

Deep down, they all have a love-hate relationship with the Jewish substratum of European culture.

Crisis of values, fear of runaway progress, nostalgia for the past... All ingredients that remind us of the present moment.

Are we facing a reactionary present?

Absolutely.

The curious thing is that in the same way that the Reaction moved from politics to literature, now the reactionary has returned to politics again with right-wing populism.

There we have Putin and his leading thinkers such as Alexander Duguin or Iván Ilyin, who speak of the loss of Western values and once again evoke the old Eurasian ghost that would stop this decline through a great revolt.

And it's not just in Russia.

One of Steve Bannon's references, Donald Trump's former ideologue, is Julius Evola.

Both Duguin and Evola speak of a West in crisis and of a great inevitable revolt.

Why this new title, what is between the myth and the revolt?

It is a reflection on time.

The great question of the modern intellectual, whether on the left or the right, is the question of freedom.

By mistrusting progress, the question arises whether to remain prisoners of the cyclical temporality of myth or aspire to the revolt that will give us back freedom in a conditioned world.

What current authors would you define as reactionaries?

Despite not fitting into the chronological pattern of the book, I was tempted to add the Italian Roberto Calasso.

He is a seminal writer because he has abridged and edited these considered "cursed" authors for a long time.

He analyzes the myth and questions the progress of our secular, accelerated and logarithmic society.

Then there is Houellebecq, who works on land fertilized by Huysmans or Baudelaire.

His novels are placed outside the intellectual comfort zone, popularizing a certain nihilism.