Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
and Spanish centralism that competed with an emerging Galician nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, as shown by texts contemporary with those studied in this introductory chapter – Leopoldo Pedreira Taibo’s El regionalismo en Galicia (Estudio crítico) (Regionalism in Galicia (A Critical Study)) (1894) is a case in point – and others such as Augusto González Besada’s Galician literary histories (1885, 1887), which will be the subject of extended analysis in Chapter 1. The colonial trope of sentimental femininity as an outcome of Galician Celtic origins will continue to reverberate with persistent force throughout the twentieth century, being alternately contested and affirmed in the discourses of Galician political nationalism and Spanish centralism respectively. Its political function as a vehicle for colonizing discourses on Galicia was reinstated, for example, during the first decades of the twentieth century in the myriad texts about Galicia published in Spanish, including travel writings, popular fiction and non-fiction books about the region. Azorín’s book Galicia (Paisajes, gentes, carácter, costumbres, escritores …) (Galicia (Landscapes, People, Character, Customs, Writers)) – an anthology of the articles he wrote on Galician themes after 1912 – is marked by images of Galicia as a ‘región serena e inaccesible’ (a serene and inaccessible region) (1929a: 62), where a kind of poetry and music predominate that are characterized by being ‘dulcemente plañider[a]s’ (sweetly plaintive) (1930: 37) and where a population of lachrymose men (1930: 38) and loving and tender women live (1929b: 33). In 1911, Miguel de Unamuno published his travelogue Por tierras de Portugal y de España (Through the Lands of Portugal and Spain), in which his chapter on Galicia draws on analogous metaphors. Galicia is described as ‘Un paisaje femenino … incubador de morriñas y saudades’ (A feminine landscape … where nostalgia and homesickness are nurtured) (Unamuno, 1941: 163, italics in the original). After acknowledging that the Celtic ancestry of the Galician people cannot be denied (165), Unamuno elaborates on the trope of the melancholy Galician, a race that ‘rehuye luchar y se adapta y acomoda con adaptación pasiva más que activa, haciéndose al ámbito en vez de hacérselo a sí’ (avoids fighting and adapts itself with an adaptation that is more passive than active, adjusting itself to the surroundings rather than forcing the surroundings to adjust to it) and displays its characteristic ‘mansedumbre y blandura’ (meekness and softness) at all times (1941: 167). Similar images pepper Juan Ramón Jiménez’s prose on Galician themes, where negative portrayals abound of the Galician ‘hombre escaso en la opaca totalidad melancólica’ (hardly a man in the opaque melancholic totality) living in a ‘cárcel de ventanas en condenación de agua, niebla, llanto’ (a prison of windows, under a curse of rain, mist and tears) (1958: 109–10). Again, in the writings of the Galician Madrid-based essayist Victoriano García Martí throughout his career, we find this recurrent metaphoric structure. Both in his 1927 book Una punta de Europa: Ritmo y matices de la vida gallega (A European Corner: The Rhythm and Features of Galician Life) and in the reworked edition he published during the Franco dictatorship, Galicia: la esquina verde (alma, historia, paisaje) (Galicia: The Green Corner (Soul, History, Landscape)) (1954), Galicia and Galicians appear as a pathologically melancholy people, living in a state of subjugation and inhibition that is the result not of ‘causas puramente políticas’ (purely political reasons), but rather of the ‘condiciones psicológicas del alma galaica’ (psychological conditions of the Galician soul) (1954: 14), encapsulated in their ‘finura sentimental y nativa’ (native, sentimental sensitivity) (27) and their congenital inability for any form of action (24). The historical reappropriation of this discursive compound, paradoxically, lay at the core of Galician cultural resistance to Spanish fascist rule, mainly in the national rehabilitation programme devised by Ramón Piñeiro and the group of writers and intellectuals orbiting the publishing house Galaxia, established in 1950. Of prim ordial importance for the preservation of a Galician discourse of national difference, which the Galaxia intellectuals saw as the only way of salvaging Galicia’s political survival in a post-dictatorship future, was the theorization of Galicians’ differentiated psychological makeup, for which the trope of sentimentality (encapsulated in the concept of Galician saudade) served as a channel. An often unacknowledged aspect of the discourse of piñeirismo – whose legacy is still present today in the cultural institutions created under its auspices – is that one of its chief metaphors shared a history with those repeatedly utilized in centralist/colonialist depictions of Galician identity, whilst simultaneously supplying a line of continuity for these metaphors’ circulation in present-day discourses about Galicia and Galician nationalism. Yet one question remains to be asked of the historical significance and continuity of the trope of Galician ‘Celtic’ sentimentality: what has been Galician women’s role in it?
Celticism, colonial fantasy and the Galician woman question
Between 1905 and 1915 Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s unfinished study Orígenes de la novela (Origins of the Novel) was published, a work that is today considered a towering monument of nationalist Spanish literary history. Although it was written in the last years of the literary historian’s life and was truncated by his death in 1912, Orígenes de la novela represents the defining traits of Menéndez Pelayo’s intellectual project, which was firmly embedded in the Spanish nationalist, Catholic tradition of philological studies. I am bringing it to bear on my discussion of colonial discourses of the nation in and about Galicia because it bears the mark of the far-reaching tensions between centre and periphery that, as Catherine Davies has also noted, were everywhere to be seen in peninsular cultural life at the turn of the century (Davies, 2006: 172).
Menéndez Pelayo’s historical account of how Arthurian literature penetrated the Iberian Peninsula is marked by an underlying debate on national morals. The forms and themes of the Matter of Britain, by which texts such as Amadís de Gaula were inspired, are described by the historian as ‘[A]quella nueva y misteriosa literatura que de tan extraña manera había venido a renovar la imaginación occidental, revelándola al mundo de la pasión fatal, ilícita o quimérica, del amoroso devaneo o del ensueño místico’ (That new and mysterious literature that in such a strange way had come to renew the Western imagination, exposing it to the world of fatal, illicit or fanciful passions, of love affairs or of mystical yearnings) (Ménéndez Pelayo, 1946: 257–8). The link is promptly established between ‘narraciones bretonas, en que casi siempre ardía la llama del amor culpable’ (Breton narratives, where the flame of adulterous love almost always burnt) (267) and the question of ethnic difference: ‘los héroes de la epopeya germánica, francesa o castellana, eran motivos racionales y sólidos’ (the heroes of Germanic, French or Castilian epic poems were rational and solid motifs) (266), while those produced by a differentiated Celtic race were ‘arbitrarios y fútiles’ (arbitrary and futile), generally pursuing the principle of pleasure with no transcendental aim or sense of moral rectitude (266). Among the harmful features of the Celtic literary traditions, Menéndez Pelayo singles out their differently portrayed feminine ideal, which he established as alien to Spain’s classical tradition. In his words, the problem lay with:
la intervención continua de la mujer, no ya como sumisa esposa ni como reina del hogar, sino como criatura entre divina y diabólica, a la cual se tributaba un culto idolátrico, inmolando a sus pasiones o caprichos la austera realidad de la vida; con el perpetuo sofisma de erigir el orden sentimental en disciplina ética y confundir el sueño del arte y del amor con la acción viril. (1946: 273)
(the continuous intervention of women, not as submissive wives or queens of the home, but as creatures halfway between the divine and the diabolical, to whom idolatrous worship was directed, as life’s austere reality sacrificed its passions or whims to her; with the perpetual sophism of erecting sentimentality into an ethical discipline and mistaking the dreams of love and art for virile action.)
In an association that betrays more than it expresses about early twentieth-century Spanish discourses on Galicia, the historian subsequently adds that the above rhetorically debased literary forms found an accommodating host only in the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, in the ‘reinos de Galicia y Portugal’ (kingdoms of Galicia and Portugal), he specifies, ‘de cuyo primitivismo céltico … sería demasiado escepticismo dudar, aunque de ningún modo apadrinemos los sueños y fantasías que sobre este tópico