Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
de las pasiones políticas y de los entusiasmos locales’ (instead of following the sure path that erudition and critical thinking have shown it, has strayed down the dangerous road of political passion and local enthusiasms) (8). Ostracism and ridicule, therefore, were the fates awaiting historians working for the cause of non-Spanish nationalisms. Murguía’s vehement defence of his position as a serious historian and of the Celtic theory of Galician national difference – of which he had become, by then, the main proponent – needs to be understood as a reinstatement of Galicia’s right to political emancipation from centralist domination, or, as Murguía puts it in similar colonial terms, of the right of ‘una nación con caracteres propios, distinta de gran parte de las que constituyen el Estado español’ (a nation with its own characteristics, distinct in large measure from other nations in the Spanish state) to operate free from ‘el imperio de gentes y de cosas que le son contrarias’ (the domination of peoples and things that are contrary to its nature) (Murguía, 1889: 48). His affirmation that ‘el tipo celta, y con él su carácter y sentimientos propios, perseveró de tal modo que forma la principal base de nuestra población actual’ (the Celtic type, and with it its own character and sentiments, has endured in such a way that it is the basis of our population today) (43) lies at the core of Galicia’s right to national difference and political destiny in Murguía’s vision.
However, the concept of Celtic-rooted sentimentality and Galician national identity was simultaneously acquiring a different signification in the texts of other commentators amassing symbolic capital in the debate over peninsular nationalist movements, which were by now undeniably a matter of concern for the Spanish state and, as such, debated in its main cultural and political institutions. Let us turn to another immediate response to Sánchez Moguel’s speech, the one delivered by Juan Armada Losada, better known as the Marqués de Figueroa, also at Madrid’s Ateneo. The Marqués de Figueroa was fast becoming one of the main representatives of the Conservative Party in Galicia and of the support movement for one of its leaders, Antonio Maura, who would be president of Spain on five different occasions thanks to the Liberal–Conservative pact for party alternation in government that ruled Spanish politics from 1885 to 1923. The Maurista doctrine on the rise of regionalisms in Spain was based on a combination of relative tolerance and control, compounded by the belief that a healthy dose of regional difference could contribute, if kept under rein, to the greater glory and stability of the Spanish state.3 The speech delivered by the Marqués de Figueroa in 1889, which bore the title of ‘De la poesía gallega’ (‘Of Galician poetry’), affords a rich example of precisely what discursive strategies would be put to the service of Spanish state control over peripheral national awakenings. For the Galician context, the semantic domain offered by the myth of Celtic origins, which had so far functioned as the construction ground for discourses of national identity, would become, instead, the battleground for their debilitation.
The speech opens with an acknowledgement of the undeniable force of peripheral regionalisms in Spain, an admission which was partly revealed in the preceding interventions of Sánchez Moguel and Núñez de Arce by their very existence and length. ‘Sólo donde hay energías y vitalidades puede surgir una literatura regional, que es el signo de fuerza y de vida’ (Only where there is energy and vitality can a regional literature emerge, as it is the sign of force and life) (1889: 6–7), affirms the Marqués de Figueroa in an attempt to paint a benevolent face on the rise of non-Spanish nationalisms, whilst acknowledging, in parallel, that this rise moved along both the literary and political planes (8). It is not long, however, before the notion appears that Galicia’s regionalist resurgence has been mainly a literary affair unconcerned with strong political claims:
El amor á la región debe referirse siempre, como en la poesía de Mistral se refiere, al amor de la patria común. No sé si porque el gallego tiene menos actividades para la iniciativa que energías para la resistencia, ello es que en Galicia no han sonado gritos de combate, ni hay voces bélicas ni ensueños de independencia en sus cantos, llenos sólo de quejas por el olvido de propios y de extraños en que vivió durante siglos. (1889: 9)
(Love for one’s region should always be directed, as it is in Mistral’s poetry, to the common fatherland. I do not know whether it is because Galicians have less energy for initiative than for resistance, but the fact is that war cries have not sounded out in the region, nor are there any belligerent voices or dreams of independence in their songs, which are marked only by complaints about the abandonment in which the region has been left for centuries, both by its native sons and by outsiders.)
Crucial to the politically interested formulation that the history of Galician national awakening had not displayed any violent tendencies is the further discursive anchoring of the theory that Galicians are ethnically incapable of violent political action. A series of rhetorical artifices enforce this view. First, the idea that the Galician soul and language have found their best expression in Galicians’ natural instinct for lyricism. We see here how Murguía’s use of the trope of Galicians as a poetic race serves no longer a dignifying purpose, but a nationally undermining one. Remarking that ‘[t]iene otro carácter la lengua catalana, más trabajada y pulida’ (the Catalan language, more fully wrought and polished, has a different character) (39), the Marqués de Figueroa describes Galician as a language only suited for popular poetry, that is, as the natural medium for the expression of the popular classes’ raw and unworked sentimental afflictions, which are at the same time their most characteristic psychical feature. The Galician language is thus placed in the private, domestic sphere, away from public affairs and political communication:
La complexión especial del habla gallega, su falta de desenvolvimiento por no haber transcendido á otras relaciones que las del hogar, son causa de que tenga ese cierto sabor arcáico que tan bien se presta á expresar los sentimientos propios del estado de alma del pueblo, que corresponde á ese estado del lenguaje. (1889: 39)
(The special complexion of the Galician language, its lack of development through not having extended to any relationships except those of the home, are the reason why it has that certain archaic flavour that so befits the expression of the sentiments characteristic of the state of the people’s soul, which corresponds to that state of the language.)
An undeveloped language for an undeveloped people seems to be the running metaphor for the Marqués de Figueroa’s speech, in which a lack of development is repeatedly associated with sentimentality. A crucial moment in his intervention occurs when the myth of Celtic origins is posited as the genealogical source of Galicians’ ethnic sentimentality and, therefore, as the reason for a series of unflattering traits in their collective psychology:
Llega la raza céltica primero, y queda como rezagada, escondida, durante largo período: no importa; por sus condiciones de resistencia en que está su fuerza mayor, aún subsistirá su influencia cuando haya pasado la de otras razas en quienes parece que la movilidad es ley. Por su origen celta se explica el modo de ser del gallego, ese extraño dualismo de su carácter en que se amalgaman la cualidad afectiva que se muestra en el amor al terruño y el don de observar, la facultad crítica, que matiza con suaves ironías y finas burlas las coplas populares. Ese amor al terruño, esa especie de absorción por la naturaleza, da el secreto de la duración de la raza, de la pasividad y abandono de sus hijos, de su resignación fatalista con no pocos residuos de pagana … (1889: 36–7)
(The Celtic race arrived first, but straggled behind, hidden, for a long period; but this does not matter. Because of its natural disposition for resistance – wherein its biggest strength lies – its influence remained when that of other races that are naturally inclined to mobility disappeared. The Galicians’ character is explained by their Celtic origin, that strange dualism combining an affective disposition – which manifests itself in their love for the land – and their gift for observation, their critical faculty, which colours their popular songs with gentle irony and subtle mockery. That love for the land, that absorption into nature, is the secret of the race’s endurance, the passivity and fecklessness of its sons, their fatalistic resignation, in which there are not a few traces of paganism …)
A static and passive nature, coupled with a profound sentimental attachment to the land, thus forms the psychological legacy of Galicia’s Celtic past, and hence of its populations’ collective resignation to a state of subjugation. This passivity, broken only