Tag: The Walled Society

Between 2005 and 2009, Jorge Majfud wrote two different books that explain the world we are currently living in which, in 2016, began to be perceived as an unexpected novelty.

The first book, published in 2005, is titled La narración de lo invisible. Una teoría política sobre los campos semánticos (The Narration of the Invisible. A political theory on semantic fields), an essay and analysis book, and the second book, published in 2009 and titled La ciudad de la Luna (The City of the Moon) is a novel.

Contradicting the classic precepts of economic materialism, La narración de lo invisible analyzes the importance of the semantic struggle and social narratives as determinants in our world’s social and political outcomes.
It draws a definition of the positive semantic fields (what is) and the negative fields (what is not) defined by the association of the established/consolidated social valuations (ideolexicos) to outline the meaning of the disputed/still uncrystallized social valuations.

In the novel La ciudad de la Luna (The City of the Moon) (anticipated by the same author for years in different journalistic articles and in short stories), he describes, in a metaphorical way, a city in the Sahara desert called Calataid, inhabited by European immigrants since the Spanish Reconquest.

The city is surrounded by thick walls, and its inhabitants, divided into sects that hate each other, are considered, as a whole and with a strong patriotic pride, the moral reserve of the world. Calataid hates immigrants and every new idea that comes from outside, such as the secular thought of Enlightenment, to the point of eliminating his only contact with the outside world, a train that arrived once a month with almost no passengers. Finally, with another reference that reminds us of the current drama of climate change and the rising sea levels, the inhabitants of Calataid deny the growing threat of desert sands that will eventually sink the arrogant city, blinded by its fighting and self-indulgent narratives.

These two books, published more than a decade ago, offer two global perspectives from different literary genres. They both warned us, long ago, what we were going to live through from the second decade of the 21st century.

Today, just a few people recognize this reality. The rest simply do not see it or refuse to see it.

Translation of Jorge Majfud’s The Walled Society by Bruce Campbell