3 - Utopia and Dystopia: Factory Narratives

Summary

Factory narratives capture the violence of the revolution and the exhilaration of the race to achieve the industrial and agricultural production levels of capitalist nations. While works like Sergei Eisenstein's Cmaɥka (Strike, 1924) articulated the destruction of capitalism from the workers' perspective, other works depicted the young state's struggle to build socialism made manifest in the construction of a factory or plant or expressed through fulfilling or exceeding production norms, evident in Fedor Gladkov's Цeмeнm [Cement, 1925] and Nikolai Ostrovsky's Kak зakaлялacь cmaль[How the Steel was Tempered, 1932–4]. Leftist writers in Spain were in dialogue with Soviet factory tales, although they exhibited a number of reactions toward urbanism, technology and the machine. César Arconada's La turbina [The Turbine, 1930] most closely follows the pattern of Cement, viewing industrialization and electrification through the enlightenment lens of progress, illustration or light, while Rosa Arciniega's Mosko-Strom (1933), might be considered an anti-production novel, in which the machine is dehumanizing and the urban space alienating. Yet, a third Spanish response can be found in Alicio Garcitoral's La fàbrica [The Factory, 1933], which, like Strike, is critical of capitalist modes of production, but not hostile to factories or workers. This chapter will establish the reception of Cement and Strike in Spain, map out their characteristics and compare them to Spanish factory narratives. In particular, it will examine characterization, the factory, focalization and the feat, as keys to assessing the reaction of Spaniards to the machine and modernization.