Anna Caballé (L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, 1954), professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Barcelona, is one of the leading experts and promoters of the genre of biography in Spain. From the Unit of Biographical Studies that she directs, she not only teaches theory, but she has taught and teaches through practice. A literary critic and writer, she has published several biographies and in 2019 she won the National History Prize for her work Concepción Arenal. La caminante y su sombra ( Taurus). Now she is publishing El saber biográfico ( Ediciones Nobel), which won the Jovellanos essay prize. “Biographers are great lovers of the past determined to fight against oblivion and learn from the lives of others,” he told elDiario.es.
“Concepción Arenal was a reformer rather than a revolutionary, but she went far in the defence of women”.
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The result of decades of teaching, Caballé’s latest book reflects on the genre of biography, while analyzing its evolution in Spain until the seventies of the last century. Although she regrets the weak tradition of the genre in our country, the professor is optimistic about its progress in recent years in which, in her words, “a biographical school is taking shape that did not exist and which offers many works written and researched with seriousness”.
“We must defend biography,” he points out, “as an instrument of culture and knowledge that explains where the interest in the lives of others comes from. Moreover, this culture is not limited to biographies, but also includes diaries, correspondence, memoirs, traces of the past in short”. However, the author stresses that the biographical school that grouped around Ortega y Gasset in the twenties of the last century was a failed experience. “Writers like Antonio Marichalar or Benjamín Jarnés did not take the genre seriously and devoted themselves to an exercise in style. It should be stressed that good biographies require a literary part and another part of research and a portrait of an era”. When Anna Caballé is asked if a biography is one of the best ways to explain an era, she answers without hesitation: “If you illuminate a character, you illuminate an entire era, as Simone de Beauvoir said, and biographical writing forces us to situate ourselves in a specific historical period and to make very measured judgements”.
In Caballé’s opinion, the need to reconstruct our past with freedom is at the origin of the relative boom that the writing and reading of biographies has had in our country since the arrival of democracy, although very far from the enormous interest it arouses in Anglo-Saxon countries, in Germany or in France. “A certain crisis of fiction”, says the essayist, “has favoured interest in genres such as biography, which are based on real lives, on a desire for truth, on the search for knowledge in contexts that are accredited. In times when there is such a wild separation between what is and what is not, between reality and hoaxes, a good biography becomes a relief. In a way, biography demands more freedom than the novel because you have to tell reality”.
Caballé’s book also deals with the recent phenomenon of the so-called autofiction cultivated by successful authors such as the French Emmanuel Carrère and the Spanish Javier Cercas, among others. “Although this literary formula has always existed in the form of autobiographies or novelized biographies,” explains the professor, “now autofiction is nourished by literature, journalism and historical research. This way of approaching writing also responds to the eclecticism we are experiencing in all facets and in all fields”. However, Caballé stresses that authors of autofiction must make sure that readers do not question the data they offer in their works and as good examples of this genre he cites Anatomía de un instante (Random House), by Javier Cercas; and El hijo del chófer ( Tusquets), by Jordi Amat.
When it comes to naming illustrious Spanish biographers of the 20th century, Anna Caballé highlights Manuel Azaña in her work, for his symbolism as a politician and intellectual and for his biography of Juan de Valera, a book that won the National Literature Prize in 1926; and above all the great innovators of the genre, the Andalusian Manuel Chaves Nogales, with Juan Belmonte, matador de toros; and the Catalan Josep Pla, with Vida de Manolo. Journalists and writers both, both raised the genre of biography in our country to a great literary height. On the other hand, the practical absence of women in the Spanish biographical tradition, both as authors and as objects of study, is attributed by Caballé, of course, to their relegation to secondary roles in culture. Except for the lives of queens and saints”, she comments ironically, “the trajectories of important Spanish women have been very different from those of men”.The characters that are of interest in a given era serve as a thermometer of that era. It is clear that the characters that are of interest in a given period serve as a thermometer of that period.
The author of books on Carmen Laforet, Francisco Umbral and Víctor Catalá, this writer has come to the conclusion that the last years of people’s lives tend to be more decisive than their youth and regrets that some biographies do not deal much with the old age of the characters. “I believe in the reverse of the plot,” he argues, “and I think that in youth we are almost all quite alike in our impulses and desires. By contrast, from the age of 70 onwards people tend to be quite different from each other, they’re either in their prime or they’re a wreck to cite the extremes. We could say that the endings of biographies are more different than their beginnings”. In any case, Caballé never tires of repeating that there are many personalities in Spain who are still awaiting a biography and in his book he recalls an unknown Antonio Espina, a writer and republican politician who was completely forgotten during Franco’s regime. “Espina, like so many others, would have been a magnificent writer, but in another more favourable context”, concludes Anna Caballé.
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