Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
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cómo esta multitud á la cual se creía muda, sin aspiraciones ni recuerdos, está viva y á su hora habla entre sí y para sí, el lenguaje de los dioses. Al oirles, vereis levantarse poderosa, una de esas realidades vivientes que llamamos todavía antiguos reinos, y son en definitiva, nacionalidades vencidas pero no muertas. (Murguía, 1883: vii)
(how, in an evident way, these masses that were believed to be mute and lacking in aspirations or memories are alive, and speak among and for themselves the language of the gods. When you hear them, you will see powerfully rising before you one of those living realities, which we still call former kingdoms but are, in short, nationalities, defeated but not dead.)
After restoring the collective dignity of Galicians as a historic nation held together by ‘a godly language’, Murguía introduces the marker of sentimentality, in unequivocally positive terms, as a further defining feature of the Galician national character. This trait needs to be understood here both as affirmative and self-differentiating, against the ‘sequedad y dureza [de] los que hablan desde la cuna la lengua castellana’ (the curtness and harshness of those who have spoken Castilian since infancy) (x–xi), this being a language that reflects ‘las frialdades y monotonia de sus llanuras’ (the coldness and monotony of the Castilian plains) (xi). Sentimentality appears thus as a marker of Galician national dignity, with no trace of negative or self-deprecating meanings, as can be perceived in the following passage, where Murguía brings together historical difference, sentimentality and natural poetic instinct under the same axis of national definition:
cada libro que se publica, cada nuevo escritor que aparece, cada inteligencia que se manifiesta, cada alma que se revela, nos dice de una manera clara é indubitable que este pueblo gallego, diverso bajo tantos aspectos de la mayoría de los que forman la nacion española, lo es, sobre todo, por las tendencias de su literatura y muy en especial por el predominio del sentimiento en todas las esferas del arte. Bien pronto se echa de ver, tratándose de ella, que es una raza distinta y perfectamente acusada, la cual se mueve en su mundo, tiene vida propia y por lo tanto su instinto poético, su filosofía, historia y costumbres que rijen y explican su vida social á través de grandes y dilatados períodos, ni bien conocidos ni mejor explicados. (Murguía, 1883: v, emphases mine)
(every book that is published, every new writer that appears, every individual intelligence that manifests itself, every soul that reveals itself tells us clearly and without the shadow of a doubt that the Galician people, different in so many ways from the majority of those that form the Spanish nation, demonstrate this difference in the tendencies of their literature and, above all, in the predominance of sentiment in all the spheres of their art. It is plain to see that this is a distinct and perfectly defined race, one that moves in its own world, has its own life and therefore its own poetic instinct, its philosophy, its history and its customs, which govern and explain its social life through long periods of history, although these have not been adequately explained or known.)
The process whereby the trope of Galician sentimentality goes from being a symbol of positive national reaffirmation as formulated above by Murguía to a byword for Galicia’s incapacity for national defence and articulation is a paramount discursive movement in Galician political and cultural history, whose inflections and contractions cannot be understood without considering the cultural interactions between Galicia and Spain. Only three years after the publication of Murguía’s text, the Spanish poet and liberal politician Gaspar Núñez de Arce delivered a speech at the Ateneo Científico y Literario de Madrid (Literary and Scientific Association of Madrid) on the subject of regionalist movements in Spain. The theme of his speech (and its timing) suggest that the perceived momentum of separatist national movements was becoming a pressing question for state politics, and Núñez de Arce concedes as much in his exhortation that ‘Es general, y vicio inveterado, por desgracia entre nosotros, el no conceder importancia á un mal hasta que estalla con violencia’ (Unfortunately, it is a widespread and inveterate habit among us Spaniards to fail to consider an evil to be important until it explodes violently) (1886: 8). The primordial worry motivating Núñez de Arce’s text is the political mobilization of peripheral nationalisms and the possibility of armed conflict between such movements – referred to in his speech as ‘particularistas’ (particularist; italics in original) (9) – and the central government. Several textual signs indicate that both Núñez de Arce and his audience were aware that violent conflict could turn into a fairly likely outcome, from his reference to ‘esa novísima secta política’ (that newest of political sects) summoning meetings and ‘reuniones revolucionarias’ (revolutionary gatherings) in Catalonia (7), to his protestation that the ultimate aim of these groups is ‘el siniestro designio de encender otra vez entre pueblos hermanos la terrible guerra civil’ (the sinister objective of again lighting the terrible flame of civil war among sister peoples) (43). For the most part of his speech, Núñez de Arce describes the process of Catalan national articulation as an irrational aberration, but it is in his account of the Basque and Galician contexts, which he sees as less advanced than the Catalan case, that the colonial imagery of control and political inhibition finds its pithy expression. Two important strategies are put to use, which are relevant for our study. First, he has extensive recourse to regional stereotypes such as ‘esos risueños pueblos de la costa mediterránea’ (those merry Mediterranean people) (18), ‘la viva impresionabilidad de los meridionales’ (the ready impressionability of the southerners) (32), ‘la impetuosidad irreflexiva de los levantinos’ (the unthinking impetuosity of the people of the Levante) (32) or the ‘cálculo prudente, aunque tardo, de los hijos del Norte’ (the prudent, yet slow calculation of the northerners) (32) – all of them geared towards the demobilization of political activity from a top-down perspective. Second, we find the influential depiction of processes of national awakening as two-staged, going from the legitimate expression of national yearnings purely on the literary plane to their undesirable political articulation into grassroots activism and, subsequently, party politics. On this point, Núñez de Arce affirms that the Galician regionalist movement is developing mainly as a literary movement (13), and he does so after having acknowledged that he finds the literary use of regional languages legitimate and understandable, although purely as an expression of sentimental attachment towards one’s mother tongue, which he describes as ‘la lengua del hogar, de las ternuras maternales, … la lengua que más penetrantes raíces echa en el corazón’ (the language of the hearth, of maternal tenderness … the language that takes deepest root in our hearts) (10). A link is thus sealed between Galician literary forms and sentimentality, whose function was not, as in Manuel Murguía’s text, to induce a national pride in the nascent regionalist movement, but rather to disarticulate the political consequences of such pride.
The public debate over the degree of political articulation of peripheral national movements went through a peak between 1888 and 1889, with the acceptance address of the historian Antonio Sánchez Moguel at the Real Academia de la Historia (Royal Academy of History) and Manuel Murguía’s swiftly written response to it, published in Havana and endorsed by a list of 1,200 signatories. Unlike Núñez de Arce, who had brushed off the existence of a Galician regionalist movement as ‘tímido, inofensivo y nebuloso’ (timid, harmless and nebulous) (1886: 20), Sánchez Moguel dedicated over twenty pages to dismantling what must have been perceived as one of its most enabling discursive strategies, the identification of Galicians as a Celtic nation and, therefore, the link between Galicians and a heritage of heroism, sacrifice in battle and political independence. Sánchez Moguel’s speech had a sarcastic and facetious tone to it, and Murguía’s riposte did not fail to note that the historian ‘no pudo en tan solemne ocasión sustraerse al deseo de arrancar una sonrisa á sus compañeros de Academia y demás señores no gallegos’ (could not, on such a solemn occasion, resist the desire to bring a smile to the faces of his fellow academicians, and other non-Galician gentlemen) (Murguía, 1889: 41). The tone of mockery that runs through Sánchez Moguel’s speech needs to be understood in the context of history’s professionalization as a way of estranging a new generation of historians working in Spain’s peripheral nations from the rigours of objectivity and historical truth, which were now seen as required qualifications for entering the discipline. For this reason, historians of what he terms ‘la celto-manía gallega’ (Galician Celto-mania) (Sánchez Moguel, 1888: 37) are to be derided for their ‘pueriles estravíos’ (puerile wanderings) (38), and for a historiographic