Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
but I now need to present myself as grave as a profound theologian, and as serious as a village schoolmaster. God knows I am sorry for this, but the circumstances oblige me. And I swear by my honour that just thinking about what awaits me makes me tremble like a student on the eve of his exams. Thus, I abandon my plain, casual style, and elevate myself to the serene levels of argument, for, by Jove, I shall have to face up to some very serious and brainy men.)
That the literary historian should purport to worry about the methodological robustness of his work and give vent to this anxiety almost in chivalric terms is explicated by the raised stakes of historical practice in turn-of-the-century Spain, when the rise of peripheral regionalisms had brought debates on historical methodology to centre stage. With economic and politic modernization timidly under way, the professionalization of cultural writing practices and academic disciplines developed apace by way of setting standards of quality and procedures that served to demarcate professional boundaries. Disciplines such as Geography, Psychology or Economy started to acquire autonomous status in academic institutions across Europe, while fields such as Sociology were attracting the kind of proto-systematic attention (mainly in the works of eclectic theorists such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber or Georg Simmel) that would result in its gradual institutionalization throughout the twentieth century. In her study of the gendering of historical practice in late nineteenth-century Europe, Bonnie G. Smith explains how writing historical works went from being the recreation of jurists, theologians and bureaucrats whose ‘practices and impulses were expressed in a variety of ways that had not been reduced to a formal method’ (Smith, 1998: 19), to becoming an increasingly apt way of legitimizing one of the most commanding concepts to come out of nineteenth-century conceptual revolutions: the nation-state. To practise History therefore was to participate in the politically relevant process of sanctioning an increasingly powerful structure. The emergence of neo-positivist methodologies for historical practice, which usually rested on the notion that no deserving historical understanding could be achieved without laborious empirical research, needs to be understood, therefore, as a regulatory phenomenon. In this context, the new definition of History as science, and the use of neo-positivist methodologies as an admission requirement into an elite of validated practitioners, bore the significance of a power-apportioning exercise. As Bonnie G. Smith has argued, nowhere as in the field of history were these definitional procedures more acute, as the growing division between a trade of ‘scientific’ historians and a host of amateur practitioners gradually acquired the significance of a vital differentiation between the professional and the menial, as two distinctly gendered spheres. In the interactive context of Galician–Spanish relations, charges of unprofessionalism, partisanship and lack of method in historical practice often came in the form of accusations coloured by a gendered rhetoric. Only a year after the publication of González Besada’s Historia crítica, for example, Antonio Sánchez Moguel delivered his public tirade against the ‘vanidad regionalista’ (regionalist vanity) of the ‘nuevos historiadores de Galicia’ (new Galician historians) (Sánchez Moguel, 1888: 35, 37), as opposed to the ‘fortaleza, la valentía’ of the ‘gloriosos defensores de la verdad histórica’ (the strength and valour of the glorious defenders of historical truth) (9).
González Besada’s claim to elevate himself to ‘the serene levels of argument’ in order to be able to deal with ‘some very serious and brainy men’ can therefore be read as a protective gesture against this gendered framework for historiographical practice during the early stages of Galician regionalism. Foremost among the ways in which González Besada tried to shield himself from attacks, such as those by Sánchez Moguel above, is his anxiety at every turn to give evidence of archival research. When discussing competing historical accounts, for example, he will meticulously use them to validate his own, while seldom missing the chance to mention the high degree of self-discipline that knowledge of different sources demands of the committed historian. Aware of the possibility that he may be refused entry into the increasingly prestigious circle of historical scientificism, González Besada makes a series of explicit nods to historical practices such as source criticism, which had been spearheaded by historians such as Leopold von Ranke in the first third of the nineteenth century. The following is one example:
Monumento probable del siglo XII es el canto de Gonzalo Hormiguez, y aun más que probable pudiéramos decir, seguro; y si comparamos ambos documentos, no sale ciertamente muy medrada la pretensión de antigüedad. Mas, no se diga que abuso de mis opiniones y renuncio desde luego al cotejo de ambos textos para apelar á otro de fecha indudable. (1887: 165)
(Gonzalo Hormiguez’s piece most probably dates back to the twelfth century; and rather than ‘probably’ we could well say ‘certainly’; and if we compare both documents, any pretensions to antiquity are not precisely strengthened. But let it not be said that I overstate my opinions, so I now leave aside the comparison of the two texts in order to turn to another one, the date of which is beyond doubt.)
Performing erudition was of capital importance for any historian wishing to distance himself from historical practices that were fast becoming substandard. At stake was the historian’s access to, as Bonnie G. Smith writes, ‘a brotherhood, a republic, a peer group’ (Smith, 1998: 103). For a writer of Galician history in the late nineteenth century, entering this ‘brotherhood’ was subject to a double test. On the one hand, it was important to shield one’s historical method against the potentially humiliating accusations of passion, local bigotry and vanity that usually characterized centralist attacks against the practice of regional historiography. But just as important was the practice of adulation of those ‘local’ historians who were gradually becoming the custodians of Galicia’s consolidating national narrative, usually also through the rhetoric of methodological righteousness. González Besada’s literary history is therefore conspicuously careful in its treatment of Manuel Murguía’s work, with the aim of not perpetrating ‘una ofensa al erudito historiador de Galicia’ (an offence against Galicia’s erudite historian) (1887: 171). González Besada’s emphasis on his scientific approach based on pure logic, rational induction and consideration of other methodologically comparable sources needs to be understood as a strategic alignment with Murguía’s project for a national Galician history, at a time when Murguía’s increasing methodological influence and authority in the context of Galician culture was on the increase.2 A new generation of historians of Galicia was therefore consolidating itself through a methodological debate, whereby the values of truth and objectivity, as well as the methods of painstaking archival research and comparison of sources, were being hailed as a token of masculine professionalism, as opposed to practices such as speculation or the expression of patriotic feelings, which were now categorized as amateurish. The early texts of Galician national historiography were, therefore, inscribed in a careful play of power, whereby practitioners aiming to enter the gilded halls of historical practice had to elude the potentially humiliating invective of state-sanctioned historians, whilst at the same time pandering to the emerging figures of local authority. Whether they succeeded in this or not, regional historiography was gradually being sealed as a space of competitive homosociality, where the material prestige of a male coterie of practitioners was negotiated according to codes of methodological respectability or failure that were often expressed in gendered terms.
If we briefly analyse the Spanish writer Jacinto Octavio Picón’s response to González Besada’s acceptance speech at the Real Academia Española in 1916, we see that Besada’s anxiety over methodology at the time of writing his literary histories was not unfounded. Poorly disguising his dim view of González Besada’s ‘pequeñas historias’ (little histories) (1916: 70), Picón concedes that their value lies in the fact that they may inspire a sense of curiosity for the small, which the greater works of the ‘varones meritísimos para los cuales toda gratitud es poca’ (meritorious men to whom we could never be too grateful) tend to overlook purposefully (1916: 69). In his commentary on the methodological failings of González Besada’s literary histories, he criticizes the fact that they reproduced the empirical findings of other ‘meritorious men’, and described them as ‘obras modestas que difunden y propagan lo que aquéllos hicieron’ (modest works, which promulgate and propagate what they did) (70). Interestingly then, on the cusp of his political career and in the ceremony at which he was being accepted into the quintessential institution for Spanish cultural oversight, González Besada was simultaneously denied a part in the ‘señorío de la historia