Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
they must have confronted a desperate resistance from the indigenous populations, whose rugged spirit made it truly difficult to begin negotiating or even communicating with them. A formidable, cruel clash must have ensued between the invaders and the indigenous peoples, between the Phoenician newcomers and the Celts, who resisted with the full indomitable fierceness of their race. A violent, terrible clash, whose memory has been preserved in the symbolic fight between Hercules and Geryon on the shores of our fatherland.)
Saralegui was claiming explicitly that Galicia’s origin as a nation was rooted in a heroic defence of its difference and autonomy, made possible by the Celtic people’s innate adeptness at war. It is for this reason that the historian’s account of the Roman invasion of the north-western regions of the Iberian Peninsula is explained in openly colonial terms, with recourse to the vocabulary of subjection, domination and resistance. Interestingly too, the historian posits that the bitter memory of Roman enforced rule over the ‘Galician Celts’ is a central part of Galicia’s inherited lore, as well as a constant reminder of their original sovereignty and self-sufficiency. His description of how the Galician character is naturally averse to foreign interventions can be read as an important formulation of Galicia’s colonial condition in the nineteenth century. Importantly too, the theory of Galicians’ Celtic ancestry acts here as a historical reminder of the threat of future division and separation:
La población indígena, si asi podemos llamarle, aquella parte de la gran familia galaica en quién vive como perpetuada la primitiva raza céltica, conserva aun hoy, como parte de su carácter, un sentimiento de repulsion hácia todo lo extraño, hacia [sic] todo aquello que no ha heredado de sus padres y que no ha sido santificado por la tradicion. Y esa particularidad, propia del carácter gallego, tal vez no es otra cosa que un resto del antiguo odio á la soberbia Roma, ejemplo vivo del perpétuo anatema que reserva la historia á las grandes iniquidades y á los sangrientos atentados contra la independencia de los pueblos. (1867: 58)
(The indigenous people – if we can thus name that part of the great Gallaic family in which the primitive Celtic race lives on – still displays today, as a part of its character, a sense of repulsion towards anything that is foreign, anything that has not been directly inherited from its parents and sanctified by tradition. And this particularity of the Galician character is perhaps nothing less than a trace of that ancient hatred towards proud Rome: a living example of the perpetual curse that history reserves for the gross injustices and cruel attacks executed against the independence of peoples.)
One final point needs to be added to this delineation of a pre-sentimental period of Galician national historiography, and this is the one that concerns the politically loaded association between Galicians’ capacity for poetry or lack thereof. Colonial representations of Galicians as inept at poetic composition had emerged and become widespread from the early Spanish modern period: Lope de Vega’s adage ‘Galicia, nunca fértil en poetas’ (Galicia, never fertile in poets) is perhaps one of the best-known formulations of this idea, which has peppered many a description of Galicia and Galicians from a centralist viewpoint since the Spanish Golden Age.1 That this negative stereotype was enjoying wide circulation at the time of Saralegui y Medina’s writing is demonstrated by the prolonged counterargument he included in his 1867 book. The conception that Galicians were unsuited for poetry may well have been, as Saralegui acknowledged, ‘la injuria que lastima, pero no es la amarga realidad que desconsuela’ (an injurious comment that may hurt, but not a bitter reality that causes despair) (120). In his attempt to dismantle the demeaning stereotype about Galicians about which ‘sueña la inmensa mayoría de los españoles’ (the vast majority of Spaniards dream) (120), the historian explains that, although the climate of the region is not perhaps most conducive to the ‘desarrollo de la imaginacion’ (development of the imagination) necessary for poetic inspiration (117), Galician oral traditions of sung celebrations and legend-telling prove that this is not ‘un pueblo á quien ha negado el cielo el divino don de la poesia y la aptitud para las artes liberales’ (a people to which the heavens have denied the divine gift of poetry and aptitude for the liberal arts) (117). Saralegui’s passages on this question show that the coordination between Galician identity and sentimentality had not yet been forged at the time of his writing:
De qué el génio poético no haya llegado á desarrollarse entre nosotros, por efecto de circunstancias que todos conocemos, se ha querido sacar la consecuencia de que la inspiracion y el sentimiento son incompatibles con nuestro caracter y con nuestro clima, como si bajo el cielo todavia màs nebuloso de Bretagne, hombres de nuestra misma raza y del mismo caracter que nosotros no hubieran dado á la Francia épocas enteras de verdadera gloria literaria … (1867: 115–16, emphasis mine)
(From the fact that poetic genius has not yet developed among us owing to circumstances which we all know, some have reached the conclusion that inspiration and sentiment are not compatible with our character and climate, as if under the Breton sky, which is even cloudier than ours, men of our race and character had not given France whole periods of true literary glory.)
Saralegui’s words above outline a fundamental discursive structure of colonial power play between Spain and Galicia: the notion of sentimentality was, in the decades before the political articulation of Galician nationalism, a desirable feature for Galicia’s national character profile, one which would conveniently help counteract Spanish stereotypical depictions of Galicians as boorish and barbaric. It is with this function in mind that Saralegui saw it as necessary to ascertain that poetic skill was ‘uno de los caractéres peculiares de nuestra raza’ (one of the specific traits of our race) (115). However, as we are about to see, a second discursive turn emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, during a key period in the development of Galician nationalist discourses, whereby the trope of sentimentality would be reappropriated by centralist positions as a colonial stereotype with which to stall the political articulation of Galician national insurgence.
For a historical elucidation of the origins of this trope, I would like now to focus on the polemics among the historians Gaspar Núñez de Arce, Antonio Sánchez Moguel, Manuel Murguía and the Marqués de Figueroa, who between 1886 and 1889, and in a discursive interaction moving transnationally between Madrid, Galicia and Havana, rearranged the imagery and language of Galician sentimentality for decades and, arguably, centuries to come. The 1880s were a heady and transformative decade for Galician national insurgence. The years before had seen a proliferation of texts and enterprises which had the purpose of national construction at their core, from the publication of Manuel Murguía’s first two volumes of his Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia) (1865–6), to Benito Vicetto’s Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia) in seven volumes (1865–73), to Rosalía de Castro’s foundational poetry collection in Galician Cantares gallegos (Galician Songs) in 1863 and, importantly too, its second, slightly expanded edition in 1872 (Castro de Murguía, 1863, 1872). A myriad regional periodicals and publishing houses were also established, which would serve the explosion of material being produced at the time by a growing number of regionalist writers and intellectuals.2 The use of written Galician was also on the rise, a process that symbolized the increasing self-awareness and politicization of the regionalist movement. In 1876, for example, the first monolingual periodical in Galician appeared in Ourense, the weekly O Tío Marcos da Portela (Old Marcos of Portela). Tellingly too, Eduardo Pondal’s Rumores de los pinos (The Murmur of the Pine-Trees), a collection of twenty-one poems in both Galician and Spanish appearing in 1877, formed the basis of a full Galician edition published in 1886 as Queixumes dos pinos (The Moaning of the Pine-Trees), in which the coordination of Celtic myth, national insurgence and the characterization of Galician identity as rugged, brave and heroic found its utmost expression. However, in parallel, a nationalist movement amassing increasing political clout was also resorting to positive portrayals of Galicians as sentimental, as a way of neutralizing Spanish prejudices against them. Manuel Murguía’s prologue to José Ojea’s Célticos: Cuentos y leyendas de Galicia (Celtic Peoples: Tales and Legends of Galicia), published in 1883, supplies a good example of this discursive strategy. Murguía’s text is animated by an awareness of the negative conceptions about Galicians widely in circulation in Spain, and appearing in travellers’ accounts of the region. Writing tacitly in opposition to these images, Murguía exhorts readers, particularly