Writing scenes, intimacy and ethos issues. The meaning of civil war in Manuel Azaña and Juan Benet

Abstract

In the present article we aim to analyze two key texts for the comprehension of the republican axiology in two central periods of the Spanish recent history. On the one hand, “Reasons of the war of Spain”, by Manuel Azaña; on the other, “What was the civil war?”, and The culture in the civil war, by Juan Benet. In these texts there can be planned three theoretical and analytical ways that show a political Rhetoric, understood with the terms of an epidictic speech that points out a moral lesson (Lopez Eire, 2002): the treatment of the civil war; the uses of intimacy in the rhetorical forms of the ethos and the writing scenes that place in the tension between the public and the private. Likewise, they allow to understand two moments: on the one hand, the period 1936-1940, sealed by the end of the Republic, the civil war and the immediate postwar; on the other, the period which goes from Franco's death in 1975 up to the Democracy. Both periods come together in the memory of the civil war as a central element for the construction of the intellectual critic. We will complement the analysis by taking the “Memory Notes” (1936-1940) by Azaña and The culture in the civil war, dated 1986, by Juan Benet.