Resumen de Dionisio Ridruejo's anabasis: politics and the double movement of the sea in “Elegía ante la mar”
This article focuses on the ideological trajectory of the writer and intellectual, Dionisio Ridruejo (1913–1976), often seen as an emblematic example in Spanish context of a “fascist turned liberal.” In contrast to the existing interpretations which reduce the complexity of Ridruejo's political trajectory to a debatable ideological “conversion” or to a natural and self-explanatory personal evolution, this essay argues that the inner dynamic of Ridruejo's political disillusion, the failure of his totalitarian ideals and a search for an existential and political alternative, cannot be satisfactorily explained by positing a binary opposition between liberalism and totalitarianism or a linear conception of the movement between them. The essay's argument centers on the notion of anabasis which designates the experience of being adrift and tracing a path of return through wandering. The essay elucidates the central role of elegiac poetry in working through Ridruejo's ideological impasse, following his rupture with Francoism. The undulation of the sea, combining movement and stasis, functions as an antidote to the totalitarian conception of movement.
