Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
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8 revert back to the digressive mode of the opening sections, as González Besada analyses other texts and genres (including prose and historical compositions) and considers the evidence that Galician-Portuguese popular songs played a central role in the formation of Occitan literature.
The book’s value as literary history is offset by the substantial digressive material it includes. But it is in its lengthy digressions that the metaphorical network I will examine in this chapter comes sharply into view, as the author elaborates profusely on what emerge as the book’s two main sites of anxiety: his own authorial status as a regionalist historian on the one hand, and the legitimacy, that is the ‘defendability’, of his object of study – Galician language and literature – on the other. In this section I will focus on the question of historiographical authority as homosocial enactment, whereby amateur historians such as the young González Besada calibrated their own capacity for access into the increasingly professionalized and prestigious circles of historical practice through the display of new neo-positivist methodologies such as objectivity and source accreditation, combined with the conspicuous adulation of peers. I will be arguing that, because of their subaltern position with regard to state-sanctioned Spanish historians, Galician regionalist historians’ entry into the new homosocial institutions of historical practice was under a particular strain, one that often materialized in the debate over neutrality or patriotic bias in historical method, with the latter usually functioning as a token of inadequacy that was expressed in gendered terms.
An overriding concern in González Besada’s Galician literary histories is, indeed, his awareness that, as a regionalist historian, he was particularly vulnerable to accusations of partiality. From the outset, therefore, he attempts to portray himself and his account as unmotivated by patriotic passion. For example, when affirming that any literary inventory of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries needs to include texts written in Galician and Portuguese without distinction, he hastens to add that ‘No me ofusca la pasion, ni la parcialidad mueve mi pluma’ (Passion does not blind me, nor does bias move my pen) (1885: 7). Throughout the text, he is keen to reproduce the views and words of other contemporary historians, normally to substantiate his own and to confer on his study, as we shall see, a sense of erudition, lest he is accused by his peers of ‘temor, ignorancia ú olvido’ (fear, ignorance or forgetfulness) (58). However, uppermost in his methodological design is his drive to distance himself from the acts of patriotic overstatement that other regionalist historians of his time had committed. For example, he criticizes Teodosio Vesteiro Torres and his Galería de Gallegos Ilustres. Poetas de la Edad Media (Catalogue of Illustrious Galicians: The Poets of the Middle Ages) (1874) as follows, carefully differentiating Vesteiro’s historiographical praxis from his own:
Honran, en verdad, á la patria los hijos que la quieren y tienen disculpa también honrosa los errores, que del cariño dimanan, pero sería altamente punible secundar una opinión estraviada, cuando vistas las cosas con un criterio imparcial, se conoce el estravío; por eso formulé mi opinión contraria á la del malogrado joven que consagró su vida á la noble tierra que le vió nacer. (1885: 32)
(Our homeland is indeed honoured by its adoring sons and there are honourable excuses for mistakes motivated by love, but it would be extremely reprehensible to endorse an erroneous opinion if, when things are viewed with an impartial criterion, the error is spotted. This is why my opinion is not that of the prematurely deceased young man, who devoted his life to the noble land of his birth.)
We see, then, that González Besada’s first text of Galician literary history is marked by a methodological aspiration for objectivity. In a variety of self-ironic turns throughout the book, the young historian will reveal his anxiety that any future attack on his historical hypotheses may be justified, or that his lack of expertise in the field of knowledge he is trying to enter will become too evident (57–8). This anxiety becomes a tension running throughout his Historia crítica de la literatura gallega (1887), in which González Besada’s efforts at adjusting to neutrality collapse with the inevitable pull of ideological and political vision. This methodological conflict is, as we will see, a profoundly gendered one. In his prologue to Historia crítica de la literatura gallega, which he sententiously presents as ‘la primera historia de la literatura gallega’ (the first history of Galician literature) (1887: x), anxieties over the legitimacy of his object of study are conveyed in a heavily gendered rhetoric, for example when he advises the reader that, even if his study does not match the ‘simétricas proporciones’ (symmetric proportions) (1887: x) demanded by the new neo-positivist historical methods, it will at least show a womanly kind of honesty:
Es la primera historia de la literatura gallega, y con ello está dicho todo. No será, pues, rica en noticias, ni amena, ni curiosa, ni abundante y acertada en sana crítica, pero desde luego será verdadera; y cualidad es esta en la historia, que á semejanza de la honradez de la mujer, disculpa sus efectos, encubre sus flaquezas y legitima la pobreza que lejos de denigrar, ensalza. (x–xi)
(This is the first history of Galician literature, and that says everything. It will not, then, be rich in new revelations, or entertaining, or intriguing, or full of sound, accurate criticism, but it will certainly be truthful; and this, in history, is a quality which, like decency in a woman, excuses faults, covers up weaknesses and legitimizes poverty which, far from degrading, extols.)
The theme of feminine decency repeatedly appears in González Besada’s history as a discursive device with which to approach questions of quality and beauty, and this becomes notoriously the case, as we shall see in the next section, when the historian discusses the literary qualities of the Galician language. However, there is a further function to the use of a gendered rhetoric here, beyond its use as a marker of the historian’s unstable authorial status as a writer of regionalist history. Using gendered images in historical writing was also a question of codification, a discursive strategy with which to allure and unite a male elite of practitioners, who in turn formed the prospective readership of history books. As the work of Michèle Le Doeuff has analysed at length (2002, 2003), the discursive codification of Western knowledge has been historically cut across by the use of gender metaphors, serving as much a generative as a communal function. While these gendered ‘forms of the learned imagination’ (2002: 171) drive the intellectual enterprise forward by helping the author lighten the darkness of abstract thought, they also play a part in the strengthening of bonds between the philosopher and his desired readership, thus contributing to the carving out of an enclosed imaginary, a ‘psychotheoretical situation’ (2002: 14), that is both attuned and responsive to a readership of male peers. Similarly, as Le Doeuff has explained, references to assiduous research and painstaking processes of historical verification served to ease practitioners’ passage into the increasingly professionalized worlds of sociology, medicine or history; and it was through strategic recourse to a gender rhetoric that new practitioners could ‘work a seduction’ (2002: 12) on this new erudite elite, while simultaneously displaying their methodological prowess. For aspiring historians such as the young González Besada, working in the still precarious field of Galician historiography, the stakes were doubly high, as historical practices put in the service of Spain’s emerging regionalisms were constantly under attack by centralist Spanish positions (see my discussion of the polemic between Antonio Sánchez Moguel and Manuel Murguía in the Introduction). Constant references to neutrality and methodological rigour therefore fulfilled a self-protective and preventative function for a new generation of regionalist historians in Galicia, whilst they simultaneously enforced what could be termed a ‘reactively hyper-masculine’ structure for historical practice in a subaltern context that manifested itself, as we shall see in the next section, in the use of tantalizing references to the female body and in overt protestations of scientific method. Let us examine, for example, González Besada’s own admission of this deeply felt methodological anxiety when writing Galician literary history:
Hasta ahora caminé de broma ni más ni menos que rapazuelo alegre en día de suelta, pero ahora preciso presentarme grave como un teólogo profundo, y sério como dómine de aldea. Bien sabe Dios que los siento, pero las circunstancias me obligan, y por mi honor, que sólo en pensar lo que me espera, tiemblo como estudiante en víspera de exámenes. Depongo pues mi estilo llano y corriente para elevarme á las serenas regiones de la discusión, que por mi vida tengo de habérmelas con graves y muy sesudos varones. (1887: