Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
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normalization continue to respond to the discourse of Galician sentimentality that arose from the colonial discursive framework for Galician–Spanish relations, a structure that has had far-reaching consequences for female cultural producers in Galicia. Finally, in the afterword, I address what I feel is a pivotal aspect of my study, the enduring political implications that the discourse of Galician sentimentality still holds for the perpetuation of what the historian Lourenzo Fernández Prieto has described as the ubiquitous narrative of Galicia’s backwardness (2011: 27), which I see as a colonial ‘intentional fallacy’.
An unsettling accompaniment to my research and writing for this book was that I never felt at a loss for evidence. Even more unsettling has been the realization that images of a feminized Galicia as a land of dewy-eyed, politically inactive, sentimental people are still everywhere to be found in those discourses about the region that are invested in Galicia’s continued political dependence on the Spanish state. I have tried to present the sheer volume of evidence I have found for this under a cogent, yet admittedly multiple-angled, argument. I have kept one particular aim in steady focus: to contend, by way of fleshing out the history of a particularly colonial stereotype emerging out of Spanish–Galician relations, that such a representation has conditioned not only the images of Galicians that have been ‘difundidas por España’ (disseminated by Spain), as Maurício Castro put it in one of the epigraphs of this book, but more crucially, the way Galicians have been able to think about themselves and about their own (right to) nationhood. Identifying the cultural and political workings of such mediated self-representations is the principal aim of this book. Tracing what other forms lie underneath these mediations, or surface when these are shed, must remain for now the aim of a perhaps more heartening, future project.
Chapter 1
Shaping Galician femininity: method, metaphor and myth in Augusto González Besada’s cultural writing
The Galician jurist and politician Augusto González Besada (Tui, 1865–Madrid, 1919) holds the momentous merit of writing the first history of Galician literature. Yet his status as founder of modern Galician literary history has been compromised by his political career as a conservative minister in several central governments between 1903 and 1918, and his lifelong ambivalent relationship with early Galician nationalism. As we shall see in this chapter, González Besada’s life strays significantly from the models of ideological consistency and steadiness of commitment generally attributed to the pioneering minds of Galician nationalism – and most nationalist movements, for that matter. For this reason its refashioning as the biography of one of the founding figures of Galician culture has been troublesome. Already in the pages of the periodical A Nosa Terra, which functioned as the main medium for Galician nationalism from 1916 onwards, we find numerous references to the Galician-born ministers who had held or were holding office in the central governments as opportunistic and disloyal. Portrayed as Galician by birth, not by affiliation, ministers such as Gabino Bugallal, Eduardo Cobián, José Canalejas and Augusto González Besada were often referred to as ‘os sempre ridícolos parlamentarios galegos’ (those ever ridiculous Galician members of parliament) (Z., 1921: 2), acting strategically as displaced caciques and poorly representing ‘unha cativa comedia’ (a paltry comedy), but never ‘lexítimamente un país’ (their country legitimately) (A Nosa Terra, 1921: 6). With time, however, the figure of González Besada has been portrayed in a more benevolent light by Galician historians and cultural critics, owing to his connection with Galician regionalism during his student years in Santiago de Compostela. For this reason, his significance as a political agent of considerable clout in the Conservative Party (he was periodically, and at times of political crisis, one of the king’s solid candidates for presidency) has at times been played down in portrayals that emphasize instead his role as a genuine friend of Galicia, who deflected his regionalist trajectory, almost unwillingly, because of politics’ forceful call. The Galician poet Ramón Cabanillas, a prominent member of the Irmandades da Fala (Language Brotherhoods) who would, like González Besada, base his activities in Madrid in the second half of his life, referred to the politician in laudatory terms as a man who:
inda cando nos foi roubado pol-a política, entoóu no seu discurso de entrada na Academia Española o máis deleitoso canto en honor da muller aldeán que c-o alzado por Rovira Pita en loubanza do campesío de arado e fouce, son os máis acabados e profundos estudeos sobor da laboreira xente dos nosos agros. (Cabanillas, 1952: 6, emphasis mine)
(even though he was stolen from us by politics, he delivered the most delightful acceptance address at the Spanish Royal Academy in honour of Galician peasant women, which, together with Rovira Pita’s panegyric of our peasants, with their ploughs and scythes, is the best polished and most profound study ever made of the hard-working people in our fields.)
More recently, studies in both the historical and literary fields have revised González Besada’s biography, highlighting his role in the dissemination of Galician culture in Spain. The historian Rafael Vallejo Pousada, for example, has studied González Besada’s importance in the context of the so-called ‘Goberno dos galegos’ (Cabinet of Galicians), during which, with Fernández Villaverde as president in 1903, three of the ministers in a cabinet of eight were of Galician origin: Gabino Bugallal (Public Affairs), Eduardo Cobián (Navy) and Augusto González Besada (Treasury). Vallejo Pousada’s account attempts to counteract the traditional conflation between the history of Galicia and the history of Galician nationalism, which, he argues, has clouded over the political significance of those figures whose relationship to the nationalist movement was not one of outright adherence. His critique is in tune with the generalized admission in Galician historiography that this interaction has made Galician historical narratives resonate with the tone of national identity politics, therefore avoiding the study of those historical figures who, despite being ‘os verdadeiros rectores da política galega’ (the main commanders of Galicia politics) (Veiga, 2003: 15), either hindered or instrumentalized Galicia’s nascent national aspirations. In contrast to this trend, Vallejo Pousada’s account reconsiders the complexities of these Galician ministers’ real scope of action in a context of rampant structural corruption and political nepotism, conceding that some of their actions and decisions while in government could be interpreted as of benefit to Galicia’s progress (2005: 18). Central to his more magnanimous interpretation of González Besada’s relationship with Galicia is his emphasis on the politician’s activities during the first years of the regionalist movement, his presence at most of its symbolic events and, crucially, his collaborations with the movement’s associated publications and cultural activism. In the main, he argues for a greater critical acknowledgement of the link between González Besada’s ‘aficciones literarias’ (literary inclinations) as a young man in Santiago de Compostela and his life as a politician in Madrid (75), and is critical of a historiographical tradition that has ignored this interrelation or refused to cast it under a positive light. This tradition, he adds, has been sustained by both historical and literary studies in Galicia, as the result of an implicit criterion whereby political ambivalence or dissidence with regard to pro-national positions has hindered straightforward processes of canonization. In opposition to this, Vallejo Pousada’s proposition is that Besada’s regionalist inclinations were to accompany him throughout his life as a front-line politician in Madrid and that political and literary historians in Galicia have been inclined to obliterate this fact mainly because ‘González Besada non permanece na nómina intelectual do rexionalismo militante’ (González Besada did not remain on the intellectual payroll of militant regionalism) (80).
The young Augusto González Besada was certainly present at the key moments of the nascent regionalist movement in Galicia. He contributed to periodicals such as El País Gallego (The Galician Country) or Galicia after 1885, was one of the founding members of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega (Galician Regionalist Association) in 1890 and played a part in the organization of the Xogos Florais (Floral Games) in Tui (1891), where Manuel Murguía would use Galician publicly for the first time. Recent re-evaluations of González Besada’s political biography as coherently in line with his years of ‘euforia rexionalista’ (regionalist fervour) (Vallejo Pousada, 2005: 86) have therefore turned to the Galician literary histories he wrote in 1885 and 1887, as well as to his acceptance speech on Rosalía