Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
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devoted himself to the writing of regionalist literary histories in his youth, which were categorized from a centralist perspective as derivative and substandard. The masculinist rhetoric used by Picón in his public riposte, with its emphasis on the valiant authority of Spain’s historians and the imitative practices of amateurs in the peripheries, exemplifies the central role that virile dignity played in the early twentieth-century debate on historical method. In the next section, I shall examine the gendered rhetoric in González Besada’s literary histories as also fulfilling a differently formulated function in the context of the power struggle between Spain and Galicia, namely that of consolidating the colonial stereotype of Galician feminine sentimentality at a time when discourses of Galician national identity were becoming increasingly politicized.
Feminine faults in Galician language and literature
Published in 1885 and 1887, the texts of González Besada’s Galician literary history engaged centrally with the discursive construction of Galician sentimentality which, as we saw in our Introduction, motivated many a cultural writing in Galicia in the late nineteenth century. As we are about to see, González Besada’s literary histories rely on a gendered politics of representation of its objects of study (Galician language and literature, and by extension, Galician identity), which cannot be extricated from the formative period that the 1880s and 1890s were in the history of Galician nationalist discourse. A network of dualities lies at the heart of the process towards political articulation of the movement, dualities that materialized during this period in the growing disassociation between liberals and traditionalists (represented in the intellectual leadership of Manuel Murguía and Alfredo Brañas respectively), and in the increasingly apparent problem – particularly after the formation in 1890 of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega (Galician Regionalist Association) – of double militancy, whereby some of the new militants of early Galician nationalism were also active participants in Spanish state politics. Augusto González Besada was one such figure. He had been a founding member of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega in 1890 and had played an active role in the association’s delegation in the city of Pontevedra, all the while also nurturing his ascendancy in Spanish state politics as a member of the Conservative Party. After an episode of open conflict in 1893 between the Asociación Regionalista Gallega and the Spanish government over the latter’s decision to move the Marine headquarters from the city of A Coruña, González Besada decided to abandon the by now openly political ranks of Galician regionalism and concentrate his efforts on Spanish politics.3 Historians such as Ramón Máiz have explained these acts of desertion on the part of ‘distinguished regionalists’ such as González Besada as an example of the structural interferences between Spanish party politics and Galician regionalist structures, interferences that ultimately worked to the detriment of the latter (1984: 152). Yet we may acquire a more nuanced understanding of the duplicity already at work in the founding texts of Galician cultural regionalism if we examine some of their constituting metaphors. González Besada’s Galician literary histories supply us with a prime example of how the undermining of Galician regionalism’s articulation as a political movement was already embedded in the politician’s vision of Galician identity as feminine and sentimental.
Already in his Cuadro de la literatura gallega, and particularly in his discussion of Alfonso the Wise’s Galician compositions, we see a formulation of one of the book’s central gendered tropes, namely that of the undeveloped, ‘infantile’ nature of the Galician language. Whilst these songs, he says, ‘encierran un fondo de muy sana moral, condicion indispensable para que la belleza exista’ (contain a healthy sense of morality, which is an indispensable quality for beauty to exist) (1885: 20), the literary medium in which they are conveyed displays a number of fundamental inadequacies. Despite exuding tenderness and harmony, González Besada adds, those poems still had an air of rusticity, a lack of refinement, which the historian puts down to the medium:
Acaso será escentricidad mia y acuse mal gusto literario, pero en mi entender el dialécto de las Cantigas y el dialécto de nuestra región, no pide mucho arte, no se amolda bien con él; lo encuentro más armonioso, más bello y más sentido, cuando rompe todas las trabas que el arte impone y se presenta, combinado si, pero tan desaliñado, como naturalmente es. (25)
(Maybe it is my own eccentricity and I am revealing poor literary taste, but in my view the dialect of the Cantigas, that is, the dialect spoken in our region, does not demand much art, does not adapt well to it; I find it more harmonious, beautiful and heartfelt when it breaks all the obstacles imposed by art and presents itself in one piece yet in all its natural disarray.)
The above formulation of the Galician language as naturally unkempt is subsequently firmed up through the use of a powerful gender metaphor, that of the Galician peasant girl, which helps to enforce the stereotype of Galician identity as infantile and undeveloped. Drawing on a heavily ideational rhetoric, the historian further elaborates on his theory of Galician language in the following way:
Sugetar la poesía gallega á muchas formas artísticas, es lo mismo que aprisionar en doradas rejas al cánoro ruiseñor, es ajustar á simétrica medida la frondosidad de un árbol, es vestir con vistoso y cortesano atavío á la humilde campesina que nació para vivir y morir entre las flores del campo y la soledad de los bosques, vestida con pobres ropas que la prestan más poesía que el más preciado ornamento de aristocrática dama. (25)
(Subjecting Galician-language poetry to many artistic forms is like imprisoning the sweet-singing nightingale behind golden bars; like reducing a tree’s luxuriance to symmetrical dimensions; like dressing a humble peasant girl in the gaudy garb of a courtier, when this girl was born to live and die among the flowers of the field and in the solitude of the forest, dressed in her poor, plain clothes, which confer more poetry on her than the most prized adornment of an aristocratic lady.)
The positively connoted images of the tuneful nightingale and the lush, leafy tree serve to align Galician language with images of harmonious nature. Soon enough, however, natural candidness turns into naivety, or the limited understanding, condescendingly portrayed as blissful, of the disenfranchised. Here the trope of the peasant girl in rags – which constantly appears in hyper-sexualized form in Galician cultural nationalism’s imaginary, from Eduardo Pondal to Ricardo Carvalho Calero – falls short of fulfilling the usual tale of male-induced upward mobility that it usually betokens. On the contrary, the Galician language is represented as the poor, unassuming peasant girl whose state of isolation is so all-embracing that she is incapable of the kind of self-awareness that would lead her to covet the status of others. Further, this inability for self-drive is indicative of her own doomed fate: only by not resisting her own destruction will she afford herself a dignified death ‘among the flowers of the field and in the solitude of the forest’, irrelevant and unsung.
As the text moves on to other compositions by Alfonso the Wise and the troubadours of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, González Besada progressively builds on his theory of Galician language and literature as naturally – and suitably – defective. This theory rests on the acknowledgement that the language displays both assets and shortcomings. Thus, after pointing out that, by virtue of being expressed in the ‘dialécto de Macías’ (dialect of Macías) (1885: 28), no poetic composition in Galician can show any artistic quality, the historian admits that it will still display a triad of qualities conferred to it by the Galician language itself: ‘Facilidad, sencillez y armonía’ (Facility of expression, simplicity and harmony) (1885: 28).4 In his discussion of the main differences between the Galician poetry of the Middle Ages and that of his contemporary period, the trope of Galician’s simplicity is again conveyed through a reworking of the peasant metaphor:
La poesía de entonces es melodiosa y áspera al mismo tiempo, con una melodía y aspereza que recuerda el llanto y la risa de la mujer del pueblo, que conmueve, alegra y molesta á un mismo tiempo; la de hoy es tierna y sentida y sin gran arte corrige sin embargo la escesiva melosidad del dialécto y yá llora yá rie el poeta, pero con un llanto, con una risa que recuerda el gemir de una madre, sin violentos arranques, sin gritos altisonantes, sin conmovedores y molestos esfuerzos … (1885: 38)
(Poetry in those times was both rough and melodious in ways reminiscent of the weeping and the laughing of the peasant woman, which moves, cheers and annoys