Despite his influence on a number of Western musicians (most notably The Clash, U2, and Bruce Springsteen), Jara’s music remains peripheral beyond Latin America. His story, by contrast, is internationally well-known. Born to a farming family in 1932, Jara grew up to become a musical and socialist icon in Chile, combining folk compositions with political lyrics that served as anathema to the conservatives of the period. As well as being a hugely popular singer in his own right, he was a staunch supporter of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular, going on to write the theme song (an alternative version of Claudio Iturra and Sergio Ortega’s ‘Venceremos’) for the movement that culminated in Allende’s election victory in 1970. As the coup grew closer in 1973, however, it became clear that Jara’s life was in imminent danger. Following the bombing of the presidential palace on September 11^th, Jara was rounded up with other suspected leftists and taken to Estadio Chile (since renamed Estadio Víctor Jara). Here he was tortured and killed by soldiers of the regime, who later put his body on display at the entrance to the stadium.

The allegorical afterlife of Jara’s music, I would suggest, is premised on the dialectic of celebration and defeat that his songs have come to embody. ‘Venceremos’ – which translates as ‘We Will Triumph’ – cannot fully sustain its spirit of defiance given our knowledge of what came after, but neither is it subsumed by this historical awareness, as if the memory of that defiance could ever be smothered out of existence (i.e. by the affective flows that derive from failure). As I have suggested above, one way of exploring this dialectic in more detail is to turn to the recent solo album by James Dean Bradfield, Even in Exile: a homage to Jara that feeds on the remainders of political utopianism. As with his band Manic Street Preachers, Bradfield works the tension between optimism and resignation, mining for political (im)possibilities beneath the weight of melancholia. To be sure, the record exudes purpose in the face of this task; the musical form operates between the reflective and anthemic, as if offering a future-facing counterpoint to Benjamin’s understanding of Angelus Novus (in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’). Whilst Benjamin envisaged an ‘angel of history’ endlessly reflecting upon the rubble of the past (thesis IX), Bradfield seems intent on re-building from these ruins, imagining a future that might emerge from the ashes of their destruction.

Opening track ‘Recuerda’ is a case in point. Alternating between mournful contemplation and soaring vibrancy, the song revolves an around an imperative to remember (or ‘recuerda’, in Spanish) that juxtaposes the waning of past possibilities with their current-day latency:

Recuerda when they come to your door
With their laws and their guns […]
Recuerda Thatcher, Nixon, Pinochet,
How the land of the free
Disappeared those who would not obey
In the name of liberty.

This opening verse exhibits a sombre approach to memory that would appear to uphold Benjamin’s claim, ‘[a]llegory goes away empty-handed’.⁷ Bradfield foregrounds the devastating violence of the regime from the get-go, tracing the scars of the Latin American left’s subjugation, and thus acknowledging the ‘untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful’ historical unfolding that allegory expresses.⁸ With the arrival of the chorus, however, the song slips through the net of this melancholic pragmatism; dejection gives way to a spiralling guitar-line that ushers in the rallying cry ‘what was once lost will be found again/what is true will always transcend.’ The process of mourning for Chilean socialism is temporarily suspended, buoyed by the life that lays dormant in its allegorical wreckage. Bradfield’s practice here evokes the instability of allegory in Benjamin’s pre-Marxist works, in which it owes as much to the redemptive figure of the historian as it does the angel of history. As Benjamin notes in thesis VI, ‘[o]nly that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious’ (emphasis in original).

The song’s affective shift in gears, I think, is underpinned by the monadological character of allegory – the fact that ‘[a]ny person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else’.⁹ After all, it is not just Víctor Jara that the listener is implored to ‘Recuerda’, but the nexus of collective dreams and devastation that his memory evokes (and for which his musical influence, on this record, serve as an allegorical point of convergence). On the one hand, the consecration of Jara as a socialist martyr risks obscuring his position in the historical totality. How do the specifics of Jara’s life, death, and legacy fit with the broader socio-political context he has come to represent? The converse to this aporia is the transnationalism allegory facilitates, in which the singular fragment – in this instance Jara – can provide the binding for a more communal form of expression. It is significant, in this sense, that ‘Recuerda’ is replaced in the second verse by the Welsh denomination ‘Cofiwch’ (along with references to the flooding of Capel Celyn and the Aberfan disaster), before giving way to the English ‘Remember’ in the outro. Jara’s story is granted a unifying, transnational significance, as if indicative of both a specifically Chilean trauma and part of a broader historical paradigm relating to the subjugation (and projected empowerment) of political others.

Indeed, the formal collapse of lyricism into remembrance is a central feature of the record as a whole. The sepia tones of lead single ‘Boy From the Plantation’ may well evoke mourning, but they also suggest a futurity beyond death that erupts with the chorus hook, ‘Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez/ The boy from the plantation they could not repress.’ The Pink Floyd-inspired ‘The Last Song’ affirms a similar posterity in the face of political conquest: ‘They took your hands but they could not silence your tongue,’ sings Bradfield, centring a posthumous legacy that both challenges and renders visible the state-sanctioned murder concealed beneath the surface of the neoliberal present. These powerful vignettes – which imbue Jara’s voice with a commemorative echo that works against dominant narratives of the regime – come from the pen of Patrick Jones: the poet and playwright that Bradfield collaborated with on the record, who is also the elder brother of Manics’ bass player, Nicky Wire. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are some striking crossovers between the siblings’ poetics. The namechecking refrain of ‘Boy From the Plantation,’ for example, is reminiscent of the lyrical encyclopaedism of mid-era Manics’ tracks ‘Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning)’ and ‘Let Robeson Sing’ – a feature of Wire’s writing that was back to full swing on 2018’s Resistance is Futile, which featured tributes to David Bowie (‘In Eternity’), Dylan and Caitlin Thomas (‘Dylan and Caitlin’), French artist Yves Klein (‘International Blue’) and American street photographer Vivian Maier (‘Vivian’). And yet, there is a more restrained quality to Jones’ writing that differentiates it from the stridency of the Manics’ more recent output. Such restraint is most apparent on the plaintive ‘There’ll Come a War,’ which renders the act of celebration (of Jara’s life) affectively coextensive with an accounting for the forces that bring life to an end (and whose titular assertion might be considered in contrast to the resistive exuberance of Futurology’s ‘Let’s Go to War’.