Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
Ireland, France, Spain – where different forms of state nationalism had to grapple with internal national movements for which the claim of a distinct Celtic heritage had become instrumental. Forming a rhetorical continuum that went from the Brittany-born historian Ernest Renan’s 1854 essay ‘La poésie des races celtiques’ (‘The poetry of the Celtic races’), to its translation into English by William Hutchison (1896b) and Matthew Arnold’s influential relaying of its main tenets in his 1910 essay ‘On the study of Celtic literature’, the gendering of the Celt as either objectionably sentimental or overly excitable was of a piece with the sort of ‘sympathetic imperialism’ with which Celtic revivalist movements such as those emerging in Ireland and Wales in the late nineteenth century had forcefully to negotiate their claim for national status (Howes, 1996: 43). The pervasiveness of the image of the feminized Celt, as Robert C. Young has argued, thus became ‘part of a knowledge which has no distinct source or centre, but which a whole range of writings, from history to science, all repeat and reaffirm with an authority drawn from its very ubiquity’ (2008: 45). That the trope of the feminized Celt became something of a truism among cultural and political commentators in late nineteenth-century Britain and France is a sign of the heightened political convenience of that very image, at a time when the threat to national unity coming from the ‘Celtic peripheries’ was gathering momentum.
While the trope of the feminized Celt has been placed under historicizing scrutiny in critical assessments of British imperialist culture, from feminist and postcolonial perspectives (Howes, 1996; Young, 1995: 55–89; 2008: 40–70), the issue of Galician celtismo has never been approached in Iberian studies from a postcolonial perspective. To date this has meant that no study has explored whether Spanish centralist discourses have capitalized on a similar use of the feminized/sentimental Celt trope, as part of the discursive negotiations used in internal national conflict. This comes as a surprise, given that the issue of celtismo has been so pivotal a force in the history of Galician national insurgence, and one that Spanish centralist discourse has undoubtedly had to deal with throughout the modern period as both a historical and a political construct. This critical void further illustrates that postcolonial approaches to Spanish history have tended to focus on Spain’s ‘non-European ethnic and racial traditions’ (Santaolalla, 2002: 55), particularly on the role of Moorish and Jewish cultures in the history of the formation of Spanish national identity (Martin-Márquez, 2008; Fuchs, 2009; Flesler, Linhard and Pérez-Melgosa, 2011). As a result, there is little historical and cultural analysis from a postcolonial perspective of the discursive formations arising from the political tension between hegemonic Spanish nationalism and insurgent Catalan, Basque or Galician nationalisms, which have historically struggled for greater autonomy or total independence from the Spanish state. The present study makes a first research contribution in this vein, with a focus on the Galician/Spanish context, for which the question of Celtic sentimentality has been of overriding importance.
From rugged to soft: Galician sentimentality and national discourses in the late nineteenth century
The myth of Galicia’s Celtic origins, for all its engrained iconicity in modern discourses of the nation in and about Galicia, is a relatively recent conception. The association between the north-western territories of the Iberian Peninsula and Celtic populations was indeed part of a historiographical continuum present in classical and medieval historical sources on the Iberian Peninsula, which through an amalgam of etymological and ethnographic assumptions had brought the populations of Galicia and Gaul under the same genealogical family. Both in Spanish and Galician historical works, the idea that Celtic peoples had settled in the Iberian Peninsula, and in Galicia particularly, was well established and widespread, but it was not until the nineteenth century that Galician historians would start treating such historical accounts as a basis for the construction of a Galician national identity. Texts such as José Verea y Aguiar’s Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia) (1838), which is conventionally considered the first one to promulgate the theory of Galicia’s Celtic origins as a foundation of its historical difference, had not appeared in a vacuum, but were engaging with the French tradition of historical interest in the Celts (represented in the texts of eighteenth-century historians such as Paul-Yves Pezron and Simon Pelloutier) and with the response they had elicited among historians of Spain such as the Catalan Juan Francisco Masdeu (Pereira González, 2000). I am not interested in the process whereby the theory of Galician Celtic origins, and its nineteenth-century historiographical elaboration known as celtismo, became a central allegory for Galician national narratives; this process has been widely studied in both historical and literary analyses of the period (Axeitos, 1993, 1997; Barreiro Fernández, 1986; Renales Cortés, 1996). I shall focus, rather, on a less frequently discussed discursive movement, which concerns the gendered imagery accompanying the historical association between Galician national identity and the Celts. Put in succinct terms, I am interested in what political stakes may have been involved in a line of discourse that went from mid-nineteenth-century depictions of the Celts, and therefore of Galician ancestors and their latter-day counterparts, as a valiant, violent and bellicose people, to later characterizations of Galicians as quiet, nostalgic and sentimental also precisely because of their Celtic origins. This transformation from bellicose to sedate, I will argue, has enjoyed a currency that is still to be found today in cultural representations of Galicians, and has had far-reaching implications, as we shall see, for men’s and women’s differentiated investment in Galician national discourses.
Leandro de Saralegui y Medina’s work Estudios sobre la época céltica en Galicia (Studies on Galicia’s Celtic Period) (1867) is an example of what could be termed a ‘pre-sentimental’ period of Celtic discourses of national identity in Galicia. Establishing from the outset that ‘no es posible, al ménos sin aventurarse mucho, asignar á Galicia una población más antigua que los celtas’ (it is not possible – not, at least, without making rash assumptions – to claim an older ancestry than the Celts for the Galician people) (Saralegui y Medina, 1867: 6, emphasis in original), the author embarks upon a theorization of how Galicia’s Celtic origins should be taken as a matter of national pride, historiographical biases notwithstanding. A central source of such pride, as developed in the text, is the brave and heroic nature of Galicia’s Celtic ancestors, which also functions as an explanation for their customs and overall way of life. Thus, in the face of scarce historical sources, Saralegui affirms that ‘Teniendo en cuenta el espíritu belicoso de esta raza, su condicion batalladora, y la rudeza de sus costumbres, es fácil presumir que la caza y la guerra serian constantemente la ocupacion de nuestros aborígenes’ (Bearing in mind the bellicose spirit of their race, their belligerent character and harsh customs, it is easy to assume that the main occupation of our first ancestors must have been hunting and war) (1867: 14). Referring interchangeably to the Celtic populations in the North-Western regions as ‘gallaicos’ (Gallaic peoples) (19), ‘los celtas gallegos’ (the Galician Celts) (20) and ‘nuestros mayores’ (our elders) (38), Saralegui’s text places the emphasis repeatedly on their bellicose nature and, more crucially, on their desire and capacity for territorial protection. ‘Los gallaicos’, he asserts, ‘se hallaban por efecto de su atraso social fuera de las leyes internacionales, y unida esta circunstancia á sus hábitos de feroz independencia, constituia un obstáculo poderoso á toda transacción pacífica con ellos’ (The Gallaic peoples, owing to the backwardness of their society, were outside international laws. This, combined with their habits of fierce independence, made any peaceful dealings with them truly difficult) (19). Saralegui’s account of the clash between Phoenician invaders and Celtic populations is a good example of how early versions of Galician celtismo were bound to the rhetoric of warfare and force, which thereby linked the inaugural moments of Galician national construction to the idea of fiercely defended historical difference:
al desembarcar en nuestro territorio, arrastrados por la presciencia de sus grandes riquezas, debieron encontrar una resistencia desesperada por parte de los naturales, cuya agreste rudeza hacia muy difícil entrar en tratos ni aun en comunicacion con ellos. Debió, pues, haber un choque rudo, formidable, entre el pueblo invasor y el pueblo indígena, entre el fenicio que llegaba y el celta que resistia con la fiereza indomable de su raza: choque violento, terrible, de qué la tradicion nos ha conservado el recuerdo en la simbólica lucha de Hércules y Gerion sobre las costas de nuestra pàtria. (1867: 19)
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