Journalism meets literature

Bécquer Seguín’s The Op-Ed Novel begins with a compelling statistic: one-third of the columnists at El País, Spain’s leading newspaper, are novelists. That’s many more than at Le Monde or the New York Times, which hasn’t hired a novelist-columnist in twenty years. Why has El País embraced novelists so readily? Seguín traces the phenomenon back to the nineteenth century – to figures such as the essayist Mariano José de Larra and the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, whose two key works (España invertebrada and La rebelión de las masas) appeared in El Sol – and shows how it was revived after the dictatorship.

El País was founded in May 1976, during Spain’s transition to parliamentary monarchy and six months after the death of General Franco. Under the editorship of Juan Luis Cebrián, the paper became not just an observer but an active participant in the fledgling democracy, seeking, especially through its columns, or “op-eds”, to enable dialogue and bolster new values for post-Franco Spain.

Cebrián turned to writers, poets and novelists, including Gabriel García Márquez – already an accomplished journalist in Colombia – the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Rosa Montero, who continues to contribute. They emerged as semi-political figures — unaffiliated but vocal, giving voice to the once muted collective consciousness. Writers such as Antonio Muñoz Molina believed that intellectuals should not only educate readers about culture, but also impart a sense of morality, a crucial task after decades of dictatorship. As a group they didn’t shy away from skirmishes, which often played out in print. Almudena Grandes used her column to cold- shoulder the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa for betraying “party loyalty”; Javier Marías accused Antonio Muñoz Molina of “moral relativism”.

After a general election in 1982 and the peaceful transition of power to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, El País was increasingly a breeding ground for the “novelist intellectual,” much as the renowned Spanish football academies nurture their own talent. Seguín highlights five prominent figures in this movement: Javier Cercas, Marías, Muñoz Molina, Grandes and Fernando Aramburu.

Newspaper opinion sections became a laboratory for experimental writing that combined news, ideas and literary style. (“A column is a literary genre”, Muñoz Molina asserted.) Meanwhile, the writers also wove the argumentative techniques they had perfected in their columns into their novels. Marías wrote about the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and of Basque terrorism, both in his novels and in El País. Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina (2001; Soldiers of Salamis, 2003) blurs the distinction between journalism and fiction,

Their novels gave these intellectuals a literary and journalistic legitimacy, establishing them as original observers of Spain’s transformation from dictatorship to democracy. They began to view fiction, writes Seguín, “as a place for settling scores with fellow intellectuals, making speculative historical claims, and advancing partisan political projects – as well as testing the limits of genre, form, and style”. The fusion not only enriched their storytelling, but also broadened the scope and impact of their literary works.

One of the main outcomes of that genre-blending is a tension between the rigour of historical research, grounded in archival materials, and Spain’s historical memory movement, which relies on oral histories. This tension, created by decades of a censorious regime, pits documented history against collective memory. It is further exacerbated by the lingering mentality of censorship and open secrets from the past. Marías, for instance, used a column to attack the Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela for his collaboration with the Franco regime.

The op-ed novelists embedded their narratives in the heart of contemporary debates, striving to shape the public discourse of their era. They didn’t just chronicle the history of the Spanish Civil War; they explored the lingering and contradictory memories of the conflict, the seismic shift from the Francoist regime to democracy, the dramatic failed coup of 1981; their explicit aim was to reshape the stories Spanish people told themselves about these pivotal moments.

The Op-Ed Novel is an engaging, well-researched and sharply written account of the literary and journalistic landscapes during a period of societal transition, demonstrating how new literary articulations feed new political imaginations and vice versa. It is also an original and meticulous study that compels us to rethink the presumptions and roles of journalism and literature, challenging the boundaries that separate them and questioning their established constructs and aesthetics. If El País values novelists as regular columnists, why don’t other newspapers? What are we missing out on?

Etan Nechin is a contributing writer for Haaretz, where he covers books, culture, and politics

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