Daniel Arjona Madrid
Madrid
Updated Monday, February 12, 2024-21:34
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Imagine a great nation destroyed and invaded by a neighboring country with which it has been at war for 100 years, with its capital taken by the enemy, with
a psychotic king and a power vacuum
in which opposing factions violently dispute the throne. France was a hopeless place around 1420 and it was just then that a brash and brilliant girl came onto the scene. Thanks to her impulse, as powerful as it was ephemeral, the tables were turned, and a few years later the Gauls managed to recover Paris and the rest of their territory and expelled England to the other side of the Pas de Calais. But not everything we know about Joan of Arc explains her story.
Asian American writer
Katherine J. Chen
says she fantasized about
writing a novel about the life of Jesus of Nazareth when Joan of Arc
crossed her path. And the blame for everything was a canvas. «One day I found Christ in his parents' house, by John Everett Millais, a beautiful painting that humanizes Jesus Christ, showing him as a wounded child, his mother Mary, kneeling with him trying to heal his wounds, Joseph behind with a sad face. worry. That painting made the public of its time uncomfortable, but it helped me get out of the life crossroads I was at: I had just lost my job, I had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer... I thought it was unfair that something like that happened to me so young. . And then I remembered that Joan of Arc had died at only 19 years old and a biography of her that she had bought years ago, but had not read, came to mind. "That's where it all started."
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Chen wrote a 200,000-word draft that he threw in the trash. But the second time she understood what it was that didn't convince him about the standard view of what happened and what she could offer in her place. The Joan of Arc of her would not be the Maid of Orleans of the legend that she listened to divine orders, she encouraged the soldiers to confess her sins and carried the standard without staining her clothes with mud and blood. She, too, would not show a beautiful and delicate appearance, she would be rather unattractive and corpulent. «
She was not a saint, she was a soldier. She won impossible battles
. To end up spending a large part of her short life in prison and finally burning at the stake. When we read the transcripts of her trial, the eloquence shown by such a young person surrounded by enemies seems impossible.
Destino now publishes
Joan of Arc
by Katherine J. Chen in Spain, translated by Montse Treviño. It is such a vibrant and well-constructed historical novel, praised in its day by
Hilary Mantel or Margaret Atwood
, that it is a shame that they have given it an unattractive and strident cover, probably perpetrated with AI and that has led to some Spanish bookstores, such as La Call from Barcelona, to remove it from your shelves. Although Planeta, owner of the Destino label that publishes the novel, has assured that they have a great team of "human" designers, the fact that the author of the cover image and some details listed in the book do not appear in the book Red X by professional illustrators encourage the use of artificial intelligence.
Here we witness with an unprecedented look at the well-known story of the peasant woman who manages to gain the trust of a French dauphin who will place the crown on her head thanks to Juana's military victories. The daring warrior who was finally captured by the English and
burned in Rouen, no less than three times
so as not to leave a trace of her body, on May 30, 1431. By the way, Chen skillfully skims over precisely the last and most iconic moments of the character, both the laborious trial and its execution, to conclude with a rapture of hope: «I, Juana, will return. All prayers are wishes, but this is not a wish. It is a promise".
"The figure of Joan of Arc is one of the most manipulated in history
," Chen explains to EL MUNDO in a videoconference conversation. «In the past the suffragettes tried to appropriate her and today, in France, the extreme right meets in the Place des Pyramids in Paris under one of the famous statues of her. It is not surprising, the story is not set in stone and we can find as many nuances as we look for in such a chameleonic character. Also with regard to religion.
Joan of Arc was a soldier who received an enemy arrow in the neck that she tore out herself to continue fighting. And yet, she has gone down in history as a spiritual leader, according to the writer, due to a
misogynistic vision of history
. To the point that, when he published his novel in the United States, critics agreed in denouncing his secular vision of a figure whose kingdom, for so many people, is not of this world and who, more than five centuries after his execution, would be beatified by the Catholic Church in 1909 and canonized in 1920.
All of this surprised Chen because she considers herself a religious person, but she also believes that it is not necessary to exhibit visions or divine orders and that the manifestation of God unfolds in the actions of human beings themselves. «
Without it, France would not have won the Hundred Years' War two decades later
and expelled the English. Juana played a fundamental role at the right moment in history and that was fortunate for her country, which thanks to her managed to lift the siege of Orleans. In any case, we cannot exaggerate its importance in such an extensive conflict. "Probably the evolution of French artillery in the final stages of the war in the mid-15th century was even more decisive."
And is it possible to frame someone who lived in such a remote time within patterns born with modernity? Can we describe Joan of Arc as feminist, as some critics have thought we see in Chen's book? «We must differentiate between history and the use we make of it. No,
we cannot say that she was a feminist leader
at that time, but she is in my novel because I have put a lot of myself into it in search of identification by contemporary readers. She is not cynical either, in the final moments, imprisoned, starving and awaiting her scaffold, she is very aware of her future, she is afraid and rebels against destiny. Because destiny is not written and I hope that my readers, especially Americans in this terrible moment of polarization that my country is experiencing, inspire them to seek a better future together.