Prior to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the Second World War thereafter, philosophers Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset had already presaged the existential assertion by Jean Paul Sartre that the self’s understanding is derived from worldly projects, doing away with the Cartesian ego by proposing an individual subject who is continually being self-made through circumstance. Concepts such as authenticity, anxiety, nothingness and nausea only later gained currency due to the negation that thinkers like Ortega (following Kierkegaard and Nietzche) placed at the very possibility of subjectivity. Or as Unamuno specifically writes in Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, “la identidad, que es la muerte, es la aspiración del intelecto”. 

            It need not be said that Existentialism, despite being a derivative movement informed by phenomenology, took hold within a post-1945 mood where technological warfare and an incomprehensible number of fatalities made older aesthetic and philosophical systems of representation and agency seem inadequate and unviable. As Existentialism flourished in post-war Europe, a host of Spanish novelists adapted ideas proposed by thinkers like Sartre to a culture made impotent and subdued by the oppressive and ideological hegemony of franquismo. My paper focuses on one such writer, Joan Sales, whose sprawling novel, Incerta glòria, documents the anxiety and despair rooted in the manner in which Republicanism within Catalonia perished as much by mauvaise foi within the ranks of competing leftist ideologies as by Fascism. Sales’ novel imports different variants of Existentialism and places them within the discourse of its principal characters, making the work a negotiation between Sartre’s collaborateur, Camus’ homme révolté and Marcel’s relating participant. I conclude that Sales, by surveying a cosmic and metaphysical dimension of the human condition, ultimately yearns to recollect the uncertain glory of April 17^th 1931, the day Francesc Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic and established the first Generalitat in modern times.

I would like to submit this paper as part of a proposed interdisciplinary panel entitled “Existentialism and the Emergence of the Political” with Robert Kirsch of Virginia Tech, who submitted an abstract to the German-Austrian-Swiss division. If the proposals are granted submission, we would be open to amending the panel’s thematic scope to include any other relevant abstracts independently submitted by others.