Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
Although his literary histories have attracted virtually no critical attention in Galicia beyond nominal reference, his speech at the Royal Spanish Academy has recently been translated into Galician, re-edited and presented to the Galician public as an ‘obra reabilitadora da vera effigies de Rosalia’ (a text that rehabilitates the true image of Rosalía de Castro) (Garcia Negro, 2004: 5). Besada’s speech, the first biography of Rosalía de Castro after Manuel Murguía’s chapter in Los precursores (The Precursors) (1885: 168–200), is approached in this re-edition as the work of a politician who, three years before his death and at the cusp of his political career in Madrid, looks back nostalgically at his youthful affiliation with regionalism and inscribes in the text a certain desire for redemption.1 Garcia Negro’s rebranding of this speech resorts to the image of the return to the maternal homeland, when Garcia Negro describes it as a ‘¿reparación? ou [d]unha devolución á sua terra de nacimento, como unha sorte de unión umbilical con ela, através dun símbolo superlativo’ (reparation? Or perhaps a return to his homeland, as a kind of umbilical attachment with it, expressed through a superlative symbol) (2004: 14, emphasis in the original). However, although Garcia Negro introduces the text as the politician’s heartfelt tribute to Rosalía de Castro, she still puzzles over the paradox that what she sees as a thoughtful and sensitive account of Rosalía de Castro’s significance should have sprung from a man whose sensitivity towards Galicia had been mangled by years of self-serving political activity in Madrid (2004: 11). The same paradox underlies Francisco Rodríguez’s afterword in the book, where, after a description of the text as unexpectedly appreciative of Rosalía de Castro’s ‘true image’, the critic still grapples with the glaring contradiction between Besada’s seeming reverence for Rosalía de Castro and the fact that he was ‘un dos manipuladores ao servizo dunha estratéxia ideolóxico-cultural do Estado español’ (one of the manipulators in the service of the Spanish state’s ideological/cultural strategies) (Rodríguez, 2004: 93). In a necessarily decontextualizing turn, the scholar decides that the politician must have been simply appreciative of literary talent (94).
We see, then, that intermediary cultural and political agents such as Augusto González Besada have posed a challenge for Galician cultural history and its practitioners. In a nutshell, the study of such figures has been temporarily delayed – because of their direct responsibility in forging Galicia’s ineffective exchange of progress for identity at the beginning of the twentieth century (Veiga, 2003: 35) – only to be recently promoted by cultural critics who have seen in their writing a kernel of genuine attachment towards Galicia, albeit one riddled with contradictions. A more historicizing scrutiny of such contradictions may help us disambiguate, at least tentatively, questions of differentiation and power during a formative period of Galician national discourse in the frame of Spanish state politics. Figures such as Augusto González Besada, who straddled political and cultural boundaries between Galicia and Spain throughout his career, provide us with crucial keys to the discursive understanding of Spanish–Galician power relations at the beginning of the twentieth century, beyond the question of these figures’ commitment or affiliation to one cause or the other. Thus Garcia Negro’s passing observation that González Besada moved in a constant conflict of duality between ‘Galiza/España; sentimento/práctica política; devocións/intereses; cariño/diñeiro e poder’ (Galicia/Spain, sentiment/political praxis, devotion/interests, affection/power) (2004: 17) provides a suitable perspective for this chapter’s content.
The above reference to a sentimental angle offers an insight into the controversy that I will analyse with regard to González Besada’s cultural writings. An exploration of his cultural texts, from the two histories of Galician literature he wrote in 1885 and 1887, at the time of his involvement with Galician regionalism, to his Academy address on Rosalía de Castro when he was an influential politician in the Spanish government, throws light on how different discourses of Galician identity were being used to negotiate the formation and scope of Galician national resurgence, and on how cultural texts such as literary histories were crucial in this process. Specifically, we will see how the politician’s cultural texts include repeated theorizations of Galician identity – and of its three main constituents: Galician territory, language and people – as harmonious with a definition of Galician regionalism that would consentingly delegate its aspirations to the greater good of the Spanish nation. Further, this political outline is carried across by the gender metaphors on which his texts rest, which help the author depict an image of Galician identity and culture not only as naturally gentle and innocuous, but as politically inoperative. In other words, region, language and culture are described in relation to images of women and femininity, which, with the aid of ingratiating comment and undermining rhetoric, served to deny the region’s capacity for action. In political terms, this gendered vision of a region only fit for sentimental expression served the double purpose of appearing to pander to Galician regionalist aspirations while simultaneously obstructing their material political advances. Keeping this general outline in mind, my analysis in this chapter will look at three critical questions thrown up by González Besada’s texts. First, I shall look at the matter of historical methodology as a ground on which a much-berated host of ‘local historians’ had to prove their academic worth. As we saw in the Introduction, attacks on the erudite men who were directing their efforts towards the histories of the country’s peripheral nations were becoming a frequent leitmotif in the institutional circuits of Spanish historical practice. Doing regional history was, therefore, a hazardous occupation, and one whose stakes were being raised by a gendered rhetoric of attack and ridicule, of exclusion and inclusion, in increasingly professionalized homosocial circuits. I will look at the texts of González Besada’s Galician literary history as an anxious response to such raised stakes, and one that both seals and unleashes the role of regional historical practice as a space where homosocial processes of solidarity or rejection were crucial to the circulation of texts. I will then examine the multiple gendered metaphors appearing in González Besada’s texts as fulfilling the double function of tantalizing a male-defined audience, whilst simultaneously affirming the trope of Galician femininity and sentimentality in a colonial political structure. Finally, I will explain how the colonial narrative of Galician femininity and sentimentality is aptly embodied in González Besada’s 1916 biography of Rosalía de Castro, at a time when cultural conflict on her legacy had become a veritable ground for political manoeuvring on Galicia’s national question.
‘Los historiadores modernos de Galicia’: historical method in the periphery
González Besada was a law student in Santiago de Compostela during the heady early years of Galician regionalism. As part of the cultural programme of the Ateneo Gallego de la Juventud Católica de Santiago (Santiago’s Catholic Youth Society), founded by the main representative of traditionalist regionalism, Alfredo Brañas, the young González Besada wrote and published a variety of articles on the theme of the Galician language, which were part of his dissertation Cuadro de la literatura gallega en los siglos XIII y XIV (Overview of Galician Literature in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries). This piece was awarded the ‘escribanía de plata’ (silver inkstand) in the Juegos florales of 1885 and was immediately published as a book by the Diputación de Pontevedra (the local government of the Galician province of Pontevedra). In 1887, an expanded version of this first study, entitled Historia crítica de la literatura gallega (Critical History of Galician Literature), was published by Andrés Martínez Salazar’s Biblioteca Gallega (Galician Library), which was fast becoming the main medium for the texts of Galician regionalism.
The Cuadro de la literatura gallega en los siglos XIII y XIV comprises eight brief chapters, accompanied by a prologue and an epilogue. The book’s contents in terms of historical narrative can be summarized as follows. The first chapter is a brief account of why in historical – and, as González Besada puts it, ‘logical’ – terms the Galician and Portuguese languages should be considered indistinguishable entities during the periods he will survey. The second chapter is a theoretical digression on the defining characteristics of Galicia, its territory, language and literature. Chapters 3 and 4 itemize the poets and troubadours who used Galician-Portuguese as a literary medium during the thirteenth century, with particular attention to the figure of Alfonso X of Castile, traditionally named Alfonso the Wise. Chapters 5 and 6 look at the Galician-Portuguese texts of the period that have been preserved, including