(a version in Spanish appeared as: "Histéricos con
casta: masculinidad y hegemonía nacional en la España de fin de siglo.
(Para una arqueología feminista, torcida, marxista, poscolonial y posnacional
del noventayochismo)." Género y escritura: 1850-2000. Eds. Barbara
Zecchi and Raquel Medina. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2002. 120-61.
History and knowledge, istoria
and episteme, have always been determined (and not only etymologically
or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of
presence.
Derrida, Of Grammatology
The Generation of 98 is resilient to cultural and literary criticism precisely in its historicity. Noventayochismo is marked by the historical events of 98—el Desastre—and so its connection to previous or contemporary writing, literary trends, and social constructions (naturalism, modernism, nationalism, bourgeois domesticity) seems always conflictive. This resilient historicity cannot be dissociated from a century-long canonization started with themselves, i.e. Azorín and Ortega y Gasset, and continued by artists and scholars such as Pedro Salinas in the 30s, Pedro Laín Entralgo in the 40s, Guillermo Díaz-Plaja in the 50s, and finally Ricardo Gullón, E. Inman Fox, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, José Carlos Mainer, Donald L. Shaw, Juan López Morillas, and Herbert Ramsden in the 70s and 80s. Thus, the Generation of 98 presents a resistance to meaning that needs to be studied as such, as historical resistance.
This slippery historicity cannot be attributed to the generational model popularized by Ortega y Gasset. The fact that this movement clearly constitutes a well defined generation cannot explain its historical resistance precisely because the 98 is the first moment in which this model is deployed and then extended to other historical periods. In last instance, the generational model would have to be interpreted as simply part of the larger problem of noventayochismo’s historicity. At the same time, a full historical contextualization does not solve the problem either. The latest tendency to include noventayochismo within modernism or the all-encompassing category of "turn-of-the-century," propounded by scholars such as Ricardo Gullón, does not solve noventayochismo's historicity. Indeed, Gullón's claims about the relationship between modernism and noventayochismo are a very pertinent and necessary historical corrective: "el modernismo es una época, en las letras españolas e hispanoamericanas, muy compleja y rica; el noventayochismo, una reacción política y social de escritores, artistas y pensadores españoles frente al Desastre. Es desacertado enfrentar fenómenos heterogéneos, y debemos aceptar, en todo caso el segundo como uno de los elementos del primero" (21-2). Although Gullón’s adjustment is necessary, it does not still explain the historical resistance exerted by noventayochismo from within its literary and cultural location.
By reconsidering this active historical resistance in the light of feminism, queer studies, postcolonialism, Marxism, and postnationalism, I will elaborate a different thesis here. Noventayochismo deploys male hysteria as discursive and performative intellectual structure not only to create the above mentioned historical irreducibility but also to articulate a masculine and nationalist hegemony. Noventayochismo mobilizes a discourse that represents several subaltern positions which are emerging or entering crisis at the turn-of-the-century in Spain: the bourgeois domestic sphere, postcolonial Latin America, other Spanish nationalisms, queer subjectivity, and the working class. Male hysteria becomes a way to reproduce the historical conflicts of all those subaltern positions while, at the same time, displacing them onto a new body and subject: the Spanish, national, masculine body, which in its noventayochista hysteria resists contestation and analysis. In the Gramscian theorization recuperated by cultural studies and postmarxism (Hall, Laclau and Mouffe), one could summarize this discursive reorganization by stating that male hysteria is noventayochismo's main discursive strategy to articulate a new national hegemony.
Luis F. Cifuentes already argues for the existence of male hysteria in noventayochismo. He emphasizes the discursive and epistemological importance of hysteria in noventayochismo when he wonders "¿Cuál es entonces el desenlace de esta 'novela familiar del histérico'? Todas estas estrategias de represión y demarcación parecen culminar en una suerte de epistemología transcendental, que funciona a la vez como instrumento de expropiación y de apropiación" ("Apasionadas" 120). In this article, I will study this discursive strategy of “expropriation” and “appropriation” in order to analyze the ideological consequences of such hysterical and hegemonic articulation.
More specifically, I will point to the ways in which this historical resistance can be analyzed as "masculine, national hysteria" and then can be criticized as an ideological articulation of noventayochismo's historical hegemony. As I will defend, masculine hysteria's role in the new nationalist articulation of hegemony in Spain defies conventional analyses of that period. I am referring to Marxism's approach to the history of the Spanish middle-class, Foucault's theories of sexuality and the histerization of women, Anglo-American queer understandings of male hysteria, and finally the non-Atlantic approach to postcolonial relations between Latin America and Spain. Thus, it is paramount to study the specific organization of male hysteria in noventayochismo in order then to remap the historical, social, and cultural Spanish reality of the turn-of-the-century. Mainer already pointed out that noventayochismo’s complex discursive articulations or “enlaces” will be understood "[E]l día en que se historie la conformación del nacionalismo español—como imaginario social y como institución " (8). Thus my study constitutes an essay to analyze these "enlaces,” from the point of view of a criticism concerned with cultural hegemony and subalternity.
The central importance that I give to (male) hysteria in noventayochismo must be connected with the issue of subject formation in nationalism. Renan already remarked the importance of forgetting in the construction of nations (145). In the specific case of the Spanish nation, male hysteria represents a perfected version of this nineteenth-century forgetting, by which the nation is simultaneously experienced or suffered as history—as “hurting” in Jameson’s terms—and enjoyed as non-history, nature, or body. Benedict Anderson has insightfully retaken Renan’s remarks and proclaimed that “it is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny” (19). However, both Renan and Anderson have not elaborated a theory of the psychological apparatus that makes forgetfulness or destiny, not only a mythic, narrative structure common to many communities, national and non-national, but peculiar to the capitalist West—and only later accessible to other non-Western communities as originally Western. Departing from Lacan and Althusser, Slavoj Zizek emphasizes that any theory of state ideology—and thus nationalism—must account for enjoyment, jouissance. Discussing Althusser's theory of the state apparatuses and their ability for ideological interpellation, Zizek concludes:
Althusser speaks only of the process of ideological interpellation through which the symbolic machine of ideology is ‘internalized’ into the ideological experience of Meaning and Truth; but we can learn from Pascal that this ‘internalization’, by structural necessity, never fully succeeds, that there is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it: it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority: in other words, which—in so far as it escapes ideological sense—sustains what we might call the ideological jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense (enjoy-meant), proper to ideology. (43-4, my emphasis)
This article elaborates the theory that the psychological apparatus underlying noventayochismo relies precisely in a very specific and historical form of political interpellation and enjoyment: masculine hysteria.
Following Renan and Anderson one could establish that noventayochismo's masculine hysteria allows to experience Spanish history as history but also as destiny—a destiny that is forgetful of its history, and thus can be enjoyed beyond any political, social, or historical order. However, and following Zizek, one must add that, in order for this enjoyment to take place, noventayochismo's hysteria needs a leftover, a surplus of senseless traumatism. This ideological leftover is derived from all the subaltern positions that give sense to noventayochismo's hysteria while becoming excluded, left over, by the latter's hysterical resistance to history. The subaltern positions mobilized by noventayochismo's hysteria become a necessary, meaningful, leftover of the resulting hysterical, national hegemony.
In this context, "casticismo" and "casta" will be studied as the central ideological referents that will allow noventayochismo to articulate its hysterical hegemony.
Although male hysteria has not been a major concern for feminist studies of nineteenth-century Spanish culture and literature, feminism remains the most productive ground to effect an archaeology of male hysteria, which then can be expanded to other areas of cultural criticism such as postcolonialism, postnationalism, queer studies, and Marxism.
In the last decade, feminist scholarship has focused on nineteenth-century literary traditions prior to noventayochismo. The groundbreaking scholarship on romanticism and realism, centered on the tradition of las románticas (Kirkpatrick) and the construction of the "angel of the hearth" (Aldaraca) respectively, does not find a critical counterpart on the studies about the Generation of 98. Lou Charnon-Deutsch has conclusively studied masculine hysteria in the late Galdós (Gender 177), but her analysis has not been carried over noventayochismo in any systematic way, with the above-mentioned exception of Cifuentes.
However, Alda Blanco’s work on nationalism and gender at the turn-of-the-century ("Gender") demonstrates that there is a critical takeover from previous women’s literature which leads to the canonization of a later realism—practiced by men and marked by a clear nationalist agenda—as authentic and “castizo”(Galdós and after). By marginalizing women’s literature as a copy of European trends and denouncing its “consequent lack of quality,” turn-of-the-century criticism consacrates men’s nationalist literature as the new realist canon. In Blanco's words, women are transformed from "“subjects of writing and reading into objects of blame” ("Gender" 121). Following Blanco’s work, I would like to propose that this critical takeover is part of a more general maneuver carried out through the hysterization of masculinity in noventayochismo. Feminism, in this way, can highlight masculinity and hysteria as specific cultural and political constructs while becoming central to the analysis and archaeology of the latter.
From a feminist and archaeological point of view, thus, one can attest to a seemingly contradictory historical reality: noventayochismo appropriates a discursive and political technology previously applied to women in Europe, hysteria. If earlier feminist studies on realism are applied to the Generation of 98, the latter comes into view in a clearer, albeit contradictory, fashion: although noventayochismo’s national discourse is coded as fully masculine, the resulting masculinity presents all the traces of what earlier and contemporary European medical and literary discourses considered women's hysteria.
In the following I would like to prove that male hysteria is the central discursive strategy operating in noventayochismo. However, and given the exploratory and limited scope of my study, I will basically focus on Unamuno’s work. Thus, I am fully aware that no matter how central Unamuno’s position is in noventayochista discourse, only a further systematic study of other noventayochistas will determine whether the claims made here, based solely on Unamuno’s analysis, can be expanded to the entire movement.
In order to isolate noventayochismo's male hysteria, it is important first to contextualize the European debate on hysteria at the turn of the century. Following Elaine Showalter’s historical account of hysteria, one could conclude that this moment, the second half of the 1890s, constitutes a turning point on medical discourses on hysteria. At that point Charcot's theories, and particularly his emphasis on male hysteria, fall out of fashion and conversely Freud's (and Breuer's) new theories and his insistence on female hysteria gain acceptance—Silas Weir Mitchell's studies of male hysteria and war too stop having acceptance in the scientific community in the USA. As Showalter argues "first Charcot, then Freud, maintained that male hysteria was more severe, intractable, and worrisome than its feminine form…. But Charcot did not do for his male hysterics what Freud did for Dora" (68). Showalter concludes that "[W]ith the collapse of Charcot's reputation in the 1890s, the study of male hysteria went into decline" (72). Catherine Jagoe further clarifies the Spanish scenario when she claims that Spanish doctors always considered hysteria a female disease and, consequently, Charcot's theories were never embraced by Spanish medicine (342). Thus, by 1898 male hysteria disappears as a medical concern and is put to other non-medical uses, among which the Spanish is most illustrative. It is not a coincidence if the publication of Freud and Breuer's first volume on female hysteria dates from just 3 years before el Desastre (1895).
Showalter adds that the political reorganization of male hysteria was a maneuver on the making throughout modernity: “Although male hysteria has been clinically identified at least since the seventeenth century, physicians have hidden it under such euphemistic diagnoses as neurasthenia, hypochondria, phthiatism, neurospasia, eleorexia, koutorexie, Briquet's syndrome, [and in the twentieth century] shell shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder” (64). In this historical context, the last decade of the nineteenth century is crucial in precipitating the "disappearance" of male hysteria. In the 20th century, male hysteria continues to emerge although always disguised under new euphemistic terms such as the ones listed by Showalter. More specifically male hysteria reoccurs in two fronts in which the male body experiences utter defenselessness: poverty and war. In this respect, noventayochista hysteria is not an exception, but a specific case of war-related, male hysteria. Although the work of Mitchell on the North American Civil War already connected male hysteria to war, in the 20th century and after Freud, this male reaction no longer is named "hysteria." However, if the large body of North American nationalist and masculine representations is always connected with the Vietnam War and its consequences, once again noventayochismo loses its historical resistance and can be inscribed in this international genealogy of war, disease, and masculinity.
Several
critics such as López Morillas (119-59), Ramsden (13-5 ), Shaw (7-11), and Biruté Ciplijauskaité (30) have already
documented and analyzed extensively the fact that disease was a metaphor widely deployed throughout Europe to
articulate discourses of national definition and criticism. As Ciplijauskaité summarizes:
La nueva investigación de los valores y sistemas es parcialmente debida al impacto de La degeneración (Entrartung) de Max Nordeau (1882), que cunde con rapidez de relámpago…. La larga serie de estudios de los "males de la patria" con enfoque crítico (Mallada, Picavea, Isern, Morote, y entre los primeros, Unamuno) se explicaría difícilmente sin estos precursores. (30)
Noventayochismo’s Spanish soul-searching carried at the turn-of-the-century follows this European medical and sociological metaphor of disease that was previously deployed by regeneracionismo and Ganivet. In this sense, Unamuno's infamous cry "me duele España" (Laín Entralgo 165) condenses noventayochismo's cultural and political articulation of this same metaphor of disease.
But in Unamuno's formulation and its generation's, the medicalization of the national problem reclaims the monopoly of embodying and representing all the historical and political "sufferings" of different Spanish subaltern groups, while articulating them as a new, historical, masculinist, and national suffering. In this way noventayochismo articulates the intellectual discourse of both the disease itself and the cure. Patient and healer meet in the same discourse. Moreover, the new attempt to embody the disease of the nation as if it were one's own, as emphasized by the first-person pronoun of “me duele España,” represents the differential characteristic of noventayochismo. It points to the way in which hysteria works as a way of articulating hegemony for noventayochismo's discourse: noventayochismo does not only embody the cure to the Spanish problem but the suffering as well.
Most critics have overlooked the fact noventayochista discourse is not simply a therapeutic prescription for the national malaise, it is not yet another regeneracionismo, but rather a hysterical discourse, which as we will see, is organized around an elaborate deployment of phobias and conversions. With noventayochismo, not only the nation but also the healer, the intellectual, and his discourse become diseased and thus hysterical; this would be the main difference between noventayochismo and previous movements. As a result, the nation does not simply experience the disease as patient or contemplate it as healer; it has access to both at the same time. The nation becomes part of the hysterical experience and, as such, brings a new component: hegemonic enjoyment or jouissance. By giving simultaneous access to the disease and the cure, noventayochismo articulates a discourse in which the historical suffering and its cure are accessed at once. Thus, Spain is experienced as a political problem and, at the same time, is transcended as enjoyment---the leftover, the unbridgeable and traumatic difference between diseased and healer makes room for jouissance. The writers of the Generation of 98 and their discourse thus become the privileged intellectual and discursive body in which this hysterization of both national patient and healer are articulated as coming together into a new hegemonic discourse and enjoyment. This is the new ideological maneuver effected by noventayochismo.
An effective departure point to analyze male hysteria in its national and ideological deployment in Spain would be the study of "performance." As several critics have noted, the prevalent genre of the moment is the short periodical article that helps the new generation gain notoriety. In other words, writing is acted out publicly; it is not intended for the individual and private consumption of the middle-class as in the previous realist tradition. Even Zola's performative "j'accuse" could be considered part of this acting out of writing. At the same time, it is important to underscore that the main concern of this performative writing is the nation, Spain. As a result, the writer becomes the performer of the nation.[1] It is precisely in this performative writing environment where the masculinist hysteria of the noventayochista writing is articulated. In closer analysis, this public performance of the national problem is encoded as a performance against and in behalf of the subaltern positions of the Spanish state.
More precisely noventayochismo’s hegemonic performance of other subaltern positions is organized according to hysteria’s two main processes: conversion and phobia (or anxiety). When discussing the case of little Hans in 1909, Freud establishes for the first time the difference between two forms of hysteria: "there exist cases of pure conversion-hysteria, without any traces of anxiety, just as there are cases of simple anxiety-hysteria, which exhibit feelings of anxiety and phobias, but have no admixture of conversions" (116). As Laplanche and Pontalis summarize, these two forms of hysteria can be distinguished, from the sympomatological point of view, based on whether the symptoms are attached to the subject's own body or to an exterior object: "conversion hysteria, in which the psychical conflict is expressed symbolically in somatic symptoms of the most varied kinds…and anxiety hysteria, where the anxiety is attached in more or less stable fashion to a specific external object (phobias)" (194). Thus these two forms of hysteria are a way to redefine the self and its others (subject/object). Although for analytical purposes they are usually presented as separate, Freud himself concedes that they can simultaneously take place in the same patient: "In the clinical cases that we meet with, this 'anxiety-hysteria' may be combined with 'conversion-hysteria' in any proportion" (116).
In this context, noventayochismo appears involved in a hysterical discursive maneuver in which both conversion- and anxiety-hysteria are simultaneously deployed through conversion and phobia respectively. Through phobia, noventayochismo denies any other subaltern position its historicity, its suffering (anxiety hysteria). Then by converting the phobic displacement of all these sufferings into noventayochismo’s discursive and performative body, noventayochismo reappropriates those subaltern positions’ sufferings while the rest of the nation is only allowed to identify through the body of noventayochismo (conversion hysteria). Given the sexualized nature of hysteria, both processes—phobia and conversion—entail a reorganization not only of subaltern historical suffering but also of the enjoyment or jouissance that each historical position affords. That is, through hysterical anxiety and phobia, noventayochismo’s new body and position eliminates any trace of the subaltern origins of its suffering and enjoyment so that, through hysterical conversion, its discursive body becomes the only site of identification and enjoyment. Any other subaltern position has no choice but to identify with it. In other words, the new body-position articulated by noventayochismo becomes the only site of enjoyment. Thus, this hysterical reorganization of historical suffering and enjoyment defines noventayochismo’s specific historicity. Finally, noventayochismo’s hysterical articulation of phobias and conversions resists a specific historical reading and thus becomes hegemonic.
The terminology of phobia and conversion can be reformulated in more contemporary discursive terms as “expropriation and appropriation” (Cifuentes "Apasionadas" 120), "displacement and condensation" (Freud on dreams) or "metonymy and metaphor " (Lacan). However, I will follow psychoanalysis’ traditional terminology since still is pertinent and further emphasizes the hystoricity of male hysteria.
As a first attempt to isolate and analyze noventayochismo’s deployment of hysteria, it is important to reconsider the texts exchanged between the two intellectual leaders of that moment: the older, established Unamuno and the young, contending Ortega y Gasset. Unamuno deploys a hysterical discourse ("Me duele España") but does not have recourse to psychoanalysis. Ortega y Gasset on the other hand, in order to secure the upper hand on noventayochismo’s hysterization of the nation, introduces and deploys several therapeutical formulas, including the Freudian discourse (I 216-37). In this way, Ortega y Gasset becomes the only non-hysterical healer of Spain, that is, a new healer who can also cure noventayochista hysteria and thus can propose a new hegemonic and non-hysterical discourse for the nation. But as soon as Ortega y Gasset enters the national debate with Unamuno, his discourse also loses its privileged position of healer of noventayochista hysteria and joins the more complex one of hysterical "healer and diseased." In short, Ortega y Gasset’s discourse is also hysterized by Unamuno’s attack and thus succumbs to the hegemonic articulation of the Generation of 98.
The exchange between Unamuno and
Ortega y Gasset takes place in 1909, when Baroja, Maeztu, and Azorín had
acknowledged or were about accept Ortega y Gasset’s new intellectual leadership
and version of noventayochismo.
Ortega y Gasset, after several years of friendship and epistolary relationship,
finally engages Unamuno in 1909 in order to gain the latter’s blessing in his
attempt to become the new intellectual leader and healer of the Spanish nation.
But Unamuno resists Ortega y Gasset’s interpellation and attacks him by
phobically claiming Spanish excellence against Ortega y Gasset’s defense of
European intellectual tradition. Ironically enough, even Ortega y Gasset
himself, the new healer and therapist of national hysteria, cannot escape
Unamuno’s hysterical reaction. Ortega
y Gasset also becomes hysterical:
Quienes rompen las reglas artificiales de la buena educación se quedan sin gozar la fruición delicadísima de ejercitar íntegramente sus energías dentro de ellas. Pues qué, ¿no estriba todo el placer del juego en el sometimiento a ciertas reglas convencionales y hasta ridículas? !Divino juego civil de la buena educación! !Deleite noble y señor el de vivir dentro de las reglas quebrantables sin quebrantarlas! !Suprema voluptuosidad para quienes son capaces de sentir la voluptuosidad de la ley! (129, my emphasis)
At the end of the
article, Ortega y Gasset himself attempts to deploy a new discourse of
melancholia and depression, and from his knowledge of the new foundational
canon of Spanish literature established by Menéndez Pidal, El mío Cid, critically reacts to Unamuno and reclaims leadership
with a final cry that lingers on hysteria: "Y, sin embargo, un gran dolor
nos sobrecoge ante los yerros de tan fuerte máquina espiritual [Unamuno], una
melancolía honda… '!Dios, que buen
vassallo [Unamuno] si oviese buen Señor!' [Ortega y Gasset]" (132).
It is this second hysterization, this national masculinist hysterization that
even Ortega y Gasset cannot escape, that interests us from a cultural and
critical standpoint. In other words, if the main fight over intellectual
hegemony in the first third of the twentieth century, fought between Unamuno
and Ortega y Gasset, can be seen as the hysterization of the nation and its
healer—the noventayochista
intellectual—then male hysteria is at the center of the articulation of
national hegemony. This struggle
would also confirm the generational classification proposed by Fox and Cacho
Viu whereas "se pudiera combinar la generación de 1898 y de 1914, creando
un periodo historiográfico de unos 30 años, acabando en la Segunda República,
que se define por el escritor como intelectual político" (17).
However, Ortega y Gasset's ascendency as new "healer" has a new chapter. Eventually, in 1911, Ortega y Gasset also incorporates a more contemporary and European tool of symptomatic analysis for the Spanish nation: Freud’s theories ("Psicoanálisis”). But by then, he casts doubts in the only discourse that could have helped analyze Unamuno's hysteria. After entitling his article "Psicoanálisis, ciencia problemática," he concludes that psychoanalysis is becoming a biological science that does not concern itself with explanations applicable to cultural and national diagnosis and thus is not useful for Ortega y Gasset's own agenda of national healing. After reflecting on the epistemological limitations of science: "lo característico del por qué en la ciencia moderna no es ningún valor y entidad mística que se conceda a supuestos poderes ocultos, sino, más sencillamente, consiste en la fórmula de una conexión necesaria entre series de variaciones fenoménicas" (237), Ortega y Gasset concludes that "trata Freud de hacer desembocar la psicofisiología en la biología y a esta tendencia no hallo nada que oponer" (237). As a result, psychoanalysis will no longer be mobilized by Ortega y Gasset for his own articulation of Spanish nationalist hegemony. He will follow the hysterical discourse established by Unamuno.
The following year, 1912, Azorín finally acknowledges Ortega y Gasset's intellectual leadership by resorting to the discourse of national malady in his Lecturas españolas. Consequently Ortega y Gasset approves of Azorín's own deployment of a medical and symptomatological approach to the problem of Spain and concludes by stating that "esta medida principalmente de alabanzas no contribuye a sanarnos, al paso que la nueva crítica es, a la vez que historia, terapéutica. Tal es, a mi modo de ver, la ventaja de considerar la historia de España como la historia de una enfermedad" (243). Thus, Ortega y Gasset presents himself as the new healer of the Spanish nation, but he never overcomes the hysterization imposed by his predecessor and intellectual leader Unamuno.
In order to confirm the longevity of noventayochismo's hold on national hegemony, it is worth referring to another later example. One of the most successful of Unamuno novels, published in 1933, is San Manuel bueno y mártir. This novel remains paradigmatic of noventayochismo’s hysterical hegemony and its persistence through the first third of the century. While remaining masculine and hegemonic, San Manuel incorporates maternal and female traits through his phobia and conversion of sexuality. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator explains San Manuel’s phobic conversion of other subalterns’ suffering and enjoyment: “En la noche de San Juan, la más breve del año, solían y suelen acudir a nuestro lago todas las pobres mujerucas, y no pocos hombrecillos, que se creen poseídos, endemoniados, y que parece no son sino histéricos y a las veces epilépticos, y Don Manuel emprendió la tarea de hacer él de lago, de piscina probática” (XVI 587, my emphasis). However the appropriation of other hysterical bodies’ enjoyment turns Don Manuel in the only and hegemonic hysterical body that performs for everybody else. To the question posed by the narrator Angela Carballino, “¿Cuál es nuestro pecado padre?” San Manuel answers “el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido.” Shifting to a medical register Angela asks “¿Y se cura, padre?” and he replies “!Vete y vuelve a rezar! … Sí, al fin se cura el sueño… al fin se cura la vida… al fin se acaba la cruz del nacimiento…. Y como dijo Calderón, el hacer bien, y el engañar bien, ni aun en sueños se pierde” (XVI 615). In other words, it is the hysterical phobia and conversion of the disease that is at the origin of hegemonic enjoyment and cure for the “people” of the Castilian town of Valverde de Lucerna, precisely the hysterical people from whom San Manuel originally learns to perform hysteria.
Thus once this structure of hysterical phobia towards the Spanish subalterns and their hegemonic reappropriation through hysterical conversion is isolated from a feminist standpoint as taking place precisely at the turn of the century as result of a war-related event—el Desastre—, this same structure can be expanded to all the subaltern positions present in turn-of-the-century Spain.[2]
Noventayochismo's phobias are extended to middle-class women and their attempt to brake away from the domestic space to which bourgeois middle-class had confined them throughout the nineteenth century. In this sense, the new women of the Restauration period and the turn-of-the-century are one of the most important subaltern groups targeted by noventayochismo. Unamuno repeatedly deploys his phobias against middle-class women by attacking their appearances in the public sphere—and its social spaces—and condemning them as morally wrong: “Más de una vez me han visto mis lectores execrar de las damas y revolverme contra el tono de ramplona y falsa distinción que dan a la sociedad" (VIII, 910).
Theater, as the intersection of literature and the public sphere, becomes one of Unamuno's favorite sites for his phobic rejection of women. He distinguishes between “señoras” and “mujeres” in order to separate them as domestic and public subjects respectively. Then, by phobically condemning any public presence, he turns “women” into non-social, natural, domestic “beings.” In 1912, Unamuno goes as far as blaming women’s public presence for the decline of national literature and theater. According to him, it is precisely women's ability to "hide" and "reveal" their selves in public that makes them so pernicious:
fue el principio de aquella segunda mitad
del siglo pasado en España lamentabilísimo para la literatura. Allá por los
años 1860 dominaban la noñez y el encogimiento… Claro está que por ser el
teatro un espectáculo y por dar las señoras el tipo medio de su público. Y
nótese que digo las señoras y no las mujeres. Las señoras, en efecto, o si se
quiere las damas, son una variedad de mujeres que junto a muchas cualidades de
su sexo ocultan otras no menos buenas
y muestran algunas decididamente
perniciosas. (XI 505-06, my emphasis)
Curiously, Unamuno accepts women’s public activity
and presence but only outside the nation: “El tipo de la mujer fuerte y libre
norteamericana no ha llegado aún a nuestros países ” (XI 506).
At the same time, he hysterically
converts women’s domestic suffering as well as their enjoyment of "hiding
and revealing" into the masculine body. Throughout Unamuno’s work there
are moments in which gender is fluid and the transition can be literally read
so that his female characters are masculinized and the masculine ones are
feminized. At the end, “man” as both male and female, public and domestic,
becomes the new paradigm of subjectivity. In En torno al casticismo,
Unamuno claims “Santa Teresa y San Juan de la Cruz, nada hombruna aquélla, nada
mujeril éste, son excelentes tipos del homo
que incluye en sí el vir y la mulier” (III 79, my emphasis).
When the double positioning of women as domestic and public subjects is finally converted into the male body, their suffering and enjoyment also becomes male enjoyment. What was morally wrong in women and source of all their defects, becomes the foundation of male privilege, superiority, and enjoyment. For example, vacuity and emptiness become in the case of San Juan de la Cruz a form of excellence and enjoyment; he becomes "el punto culminante de la mística castellana… parece que se fundieron el espíritu quijotesco y el sanchopancino en un idealismo… Su mística es la de la fe vacía" (III 81, my emphasis). When Unamuno discusses Flaubert’s letters to women in an article published in the Argentinean newspaper La Nación in 1912, he rejects all forms of public femininity for women, and reduces them to domestic and motherly roles. Then he proceeds to define men by the characteristics of public superficiality that he phobically criticized in women in the first place. Thus, men become unstable, superficial, insecure, and pedantic beings, among which Unamuno includes himself: “La pedantería masculina es una cosa formidable. Lo queremos todo hecho, concluido, definido, formulable” (VIII 911). Conversely, women become non-public vessels of nature and interiority outside the nation and society: “Y la mujer siempre está haciéndose, siempre por hacerse, sin concluir nunca, indefinible, informulable. Que es como es la vida” (VIII 911).
At that point women lose their
social and historical position and men become the new hysterical subjects who,
through conversion hysteria, can enjoy a double public and domestic
interiority. They become the only ones with an interior and exterior, although
they lose control over this doubleness, just the way women did before. As a
result women can only help men understand themselves, since men are no longer
in control of their newly acquired "female" enjoyment. Unamuno continues referring to the natural,
interior woman and adds “[Y] cuando tiene conciencia de esa su femeninidad, de
ése espíritu plástico, comprende como apenas un hombre comprende la vida, la
vida que no cabe en fórmulas ni en definiciones…. si a un hombre así, como era
Flaubert, puede comprenderle alguien de veras… es una mujer” (VIII 911). The
ultimate drama of San Manuel is also phrased in the characteristics that Unamuno
denounces in “damas and señoras:” pretense, make-believe, appearances. After Angela Carballino asks San Manuel
whether sin can be “cured,” he replies affirmatively and adds: “Y como dijo
Calderón, el hacer bien, y el engañar bien, ni aun en sueños se pierde” (XVI
615).
Finally Unamuno also applies this
phobic and convertive hysteria to the most public and intellectual woman of his
time: Emilia Pardo Bazán. In his recollection of one their encounters, written
in 1921 after the latter’s death, Unamuno reduces Pardo Bazán to becoming the
vessel that transforms Unamuno’s own ideas and interiority into public
literature. In other words, intellectual ability and position are denied to
Pardo Bazán. He begins by stating
what seems a praise for Pardo Bazán's realism: "la autora no inventó sino…
lo más y mejor que se puede inventar: el estilo" (X 484 ). He even quotes
her directly: "Muchas veces le he oído que ella no inventaba ni
personajes, ni caracteres, ni situaciones, ni escenas. Veía y miraba, oía y
escuchaba, espiaba y observaba y luego llevaba todo ello a sus ficciones. Para
lo que le servía una maravillosa memoria, de que voy a contar un rasgo" (X
484). In that context, Unamuno recalls a certain discussion which Pardo
Bazán decided to incorporate in one her novels, Los tres arcos de Cirilo. When she asked Unamuno permission to
quote him, he clearly states that, unlike Pardo Bazán, he is not realist but
productive (fábrica) and natural (manantial), that is, he does not copy; his
writing does not rely on style, unlike Pardo Bazán's: "me pedía licencia a
tal efecto. Respondíle, !claro!, que
cuanto yo digo es de quien me lo oye tanto como mío, y acaso le añadí que
teniendo fábrica y no almacén, manantial y no charca, no se me da de lo que me
tomen y menos si quien me lo toma, como a ella, le sucedía entonces, sabe
tomarlo" (X 484-85).
Once their main literary difference is established, Unamuno suddenly turns Pardo Bazán into a "man:" "Espero tener ocasión de hablar del masculinismo, que no feminismo de doña Emilia" (X 485). Pardo Bazán becomes a manly, realist writer who is not able to produce but reproduce not only words but Unamuno himself: "fui a ver lo mío y quedé sorprendido, no ya sólo de la fidelidad con que mis opiniones estaban expuestas, sino, sobre todo, del aire y tono que las envolvía, mi aire y mi tono" (X 485, my emphasis). At that point, Pardo Bazán becomes another mortal writer, just like any other man, and Unamuno reappropriates the privilege of production, a higher form of writing, since he does not copy "people" but produces them—that is, he is a writerly mother. Speaking of his novel La Tía Tula, Unamuno refers to Pardo Bazán and states that "sabía, además, que nadie, en rigor, inventa nada, aunque acaso no llegase a saber que hay un realismo más real, mucho más real, de más cosa, de más res, que el que ella defendió en La cuestión palpitante" (X 486). As a result, Pardo Bazán is reduced to becoming a reproducer of reality, one that only Unamuno, in his productive nature and enjoyment, can "produce" as if his were biological and motherly production.
Interestingly enough, one could conclude that the hysterical conversion of female subjectivity into a source of masculine hegemony and enjoyment turns the male body into the new "angel of the hearth," although this time it is a "national hearth" since the hegemonic masculine subject partakes of both public and domestic spaces. In the new noventayochista definition of the nation and its subject, the nation becomes the ultimate embodiment of the male subject: a space that has been converted simultaneously into public and domestic. Thus, it makes more sense at this point to refer to the "angel of the national hearth” in order to define the hysterical and hegemonic reformulation of noventayochismo’s masculine, Spanish subject. At this point, and as Blanco suggests, women are exiled from the national territory and lose even their prior bourgeois domestic space: they are exiled into the European territory as non-Spanish subjects who only copy European culture and fashion and thus are enslaved to it. They are denied the “national hearth” and consequently exiled; this is the first important result of noventayochismo’s hegemonic hysterical articulation.
Cifuentes has painstakingly documented noventayochismo’s phobias against another subaltern position in Spain: European modernity and the metropolis ("Apasionadas," "Cartografías"). In an often quoted article, when Unamuno refers to Madrid, his phobic hysteria against modernity comes out clearly: "hay otra cosa que me repugna en ese conglomerado de hombres, en ese vasto avispero, y es el vaho de afroditismo que exhala, aunque no tan marcado y fuerte como el de París. Nada me es tan repulsivo que el afroditismo de las grandes ciudades…. en la ciudad es donde tiene su asiento la voluptuosidad cerebral y el erotismo morboso que se reflejan en buena parte de esa insoportable literatura parisiense" (III 325). However modernity was not only embraced by European modernists but also by Latin Americans, heralded by Darío. Against modernity and modernism, noventayochismo stands out as an ahistorical oddity. In this respect the divide between noventayochismo and Latin American modernism can be viewed not so much as a critical problem and debate but as a consequence of the original hysterical reaction of noventayochismo towards modernity and the metropolis.
As several authors have documented (Jrade, Paz), Latin American writers, at least since Sarmiento, rediscover modernity and specifically the French metropolis, with a pleasure and enjoyment that is at least equal to noventayochismo's phobia: "Aware of their extraordinary place in Spanish American history, Modernist poets broke with Spanish models…. They turned their eyes instead toward Europe.... This choice underscores the Modernists' will to be modern, that is, to become contemporaneous with all of Europe but most especially with Paris" (Jrade 37). As Stacey Jrade argues, this enjoyment is connected not only to high art but also to high and middle-class culture in general and their consumption of European and, specially, French goods (37).
However most authors fail to explain why specifically Paris, and not another modern or European city, and why at this precise moment and not before, becomes the site of Latin American enjoyment. This enjoyment is related to the Latin American celebration of modernity---a European modernity that, nevertheless, is beginning to experience its imperialist demise. Latin American modernism does not embrace North American modernity and its metropolises as the latter begins to assert its global hegemony after 98. In the same way, Spain and Madrid are not sites of Latin American enjoyment but rather of melancholic contemplation. Thus not only Paris but also New York and Madrid must be entered in the libidinal equation of the Latin American celebration of modernity.[3]
Madrid remains the old imperialist metropolis and symbol of the Spanish failed attempt to modernity. In Darío’s autobiography, he describes the Spanish capital in the following way: "Llegué a Madrid, que ya conocía, y hablé de su sabrosa pereza, de sus capas y sus cafés. Escribía: 'He buscado en el horizonte español las cimas que dejara no hace mucho tiempo…Canovas muerto… No está, por cierto, España para literaturas, amputada, doliente, vencida'"(69-70).[4] In contrast, New York becomes the new metropolis that embodies North American imperialism's rise. However, the only reference Darío makes in his biography to New York is "imperial ciudad" (115); then he proceeds to narrate his encounter with Martí. In New York, Darío’s only interest is to see "nature:" the Niagara Falls. But even nature does not impress him. It is most revealing to contrast his reaction to the North American geography with the next page, in which Paris is introduced: "Mi impresión ante la maravilla [the Niagara Falls] confieso que fue menos de lo que hubiera podido imaginar. Aunque el portento se impone, la mente se representa con creces lo que en la realidad no tiene tan fantásticas proporciones… Retornamos a Nueva York y tomé el vapor para Francia. Yo soñaba con París desde niño" (118-19).
If Paris is the object of Darío’s
desire, it is precisely because Paris symbolizes a non-political or ex-imperial
metropolis vis-à-vis Latin America. In other words, Latin America can
experience “modernity without imperialism” in Paris. French imperialism unlike
the Spanish, British, and North American ones, is not historically and
geopolitically connected with Latin America (with the punctual exemption of
Maximiliam in Mexico). This “non-imperialist” postcolonial experience, which
extends to consumerism and will continue throughout the twentieth century, is
circumscribed by this conjunction of “modernity without imperialism.” In this sense,
Benjamin's reflection about the ruinous quality of Paris vis-à-vis the modern
project are central here, since the Latin American perception and enjoyment is
precisely based on it: Paris is a left-over, a surplus of imperialism. In short
Paris is the site of Latin American postcolonial jouissance—a geopolitical fetish. Darío's autobiography described Paris in the
following way: “Yo soñaba con París desde niño…. París era para mí como un
paraíso en donde se respirase la esencia de la felicidad sobre la tierra. Era
la ciudad del Arte, de la Belleza y de la Gloria; y sobre todo, era la capital
del Amor, el reino del Ensueño. E iba yo a conocer París, a realizar la mayor
ansia de mi vida” (118-19).
Given the non-imperialist
positionality of Paris, this city also becomes a site subsceptible of
“postcolonial orientalization.” Paris becomes an Orientalist place that is
consumed by Darío precisely according to modern colonialist European protocols:
"Yo hacía mis abligatorias [sic] visitas a la Exposición. Fue para mí un deslumbramiento miliunanochesco, y
me sentí más de una vez en una pieza Simbad y Marco Polo… y en ciertas noches
contemplaba en las cercanías de la torre Eiffel, con mis ojos despiertos,
panoramas que solo había visto en las misteriosas regiones de los sueños"
(181).
In this context, noventayochismo reacts by deploying an
antimodernist phobia and negation towards both Latin America’s postcolonial jouissance of Paris as well as of
modernity. Once again, Unamuno
acknowledges this enjoyment: “Poseen los americanos el mundo y gozan de la vida
de un modo en que nosotros ni hemos poseído a aquél ni hemos gozado a ésta”
(VIII, 81). But automatically he phobically rejects this enjoyment as
non-Spanish and immature. When
writing to Darío, Unamuno claims: “En la América Latina creo que se están
buscando, mas sin haberse encontrado aun. En lo mejor de que usted, amigo
Darío, conozco, se ve a un hombre que quiere decir cosas que ni en castellano
se han dicho ni pueden en el castellano de hoy decirse” (VIII 79).
However, the moment Darío admits to writing not in "American (Spanish)" but in "French," Unamuno reacts by hysterically appropriating Darío’s “French” enjoyment of Spanish language and converting it into Castilian: “En cuanto a aquello de no creerse americano… ¿Y qué es ser americano?…. si hay algo de común entre esos pueblos… es lo que les da la lengua común, con lo que ella deriva” (VIII 534). Citing Rizal and the Basques alongside Darío, Unamuno concludes: “Como que es el castellano el que les ha dado a no pocos de esos pueblos la conciencia de su propio espíritu” (VIII 544-45). Thus by converting Latin American modernist enjoyment to language and, then, by relocating language within its imperialist site of origin, Castile, Unamuno coverts Spain and its subject into the only positions from which European modernity/modernism can be enjoyed. This hysterical phobia and conversion defines noventayochismo’s hegemonic articulation of Latin American postcoloniality.
This reaction is not unique to noventayochismo, for, later on,
different Latin American national critics and writers will adopt the same
strategy in order to neutralize modernism's postcolonial enjoyment in an
attempt to re-nationalize this jouissance
(Molloy).[5]
However, this attack will perspire to literary criticism and, as late as the
1970s, Díaz Plaja claims: "El Modernismo es, por lo general, pasivo
adinámico. De modo inverso al
Noventa y Ocho, que actúa según una razón activa y operante, el modernismo es
fundamentalmente receptivo y su clave estética—la sensibilidad—implica una
actitud pasiva frente al despliegue de las cosas alrededor" (212).
In the production of writers such as Unamuno, it is clear that the Spanish nation is historically defined as the last body of resistance to European modernity: a body readily marked as both national and domestic. Hence masculinity embodies and performs the hysterical nation—a nation allegorically represented by Castile’s landscape. Consequently this performance becomes an antimodern and anti-European discourse ensuring noventayochismo’s hold over Spanish cultural and political hegemony.
As pointed out above, when discussing noventayochismo’s articulation of women’s position, noventayochismo's spatial organization has all the characteristics of the female domestic space of the realist novel. At the same time, and unlike the bourgeois domestic space, the new noventayochista space also becomes ahistorical in its antimodernism. Unamuno constantly vents against modernism by phobically categorizing it as nationless. Once again, the conversion of Latin American postcolonial enjoyment into an antimodern and ahistorical body and space produces the geopolitical articulation of noventayochismo’s hysteria. Only from within the resulting hysterization can noventayochismo enjoy again Spain's bygone imperialism and all its cultural productions—from the Quixote to Velázquez. At that point Unamuno can redeploy Spanish imperialism without empire, Castilian hysterical enjoyment without imperialism, Hispanic imperialism without modernity: "La fiesta de la Raza espiritual española no debe, no puede tener un sentido racista material—de materialismo de raza…. Hay que alejar de esa fiesta todo imperialismo que no sea el de la raza espiritual encarnada en el lenguaje. Lenguaje de blancos, y de indios, y de negros, y de mestizos, y de mulatos" (VI 911). However, this celebration can only take place, once Unamuno and his generation has learnt to convert Latin America’s enjoyment of modernity: one that is able to embrace any postcolonial condition without imperialism.
Thus the structure of hysterical phobia and conversion isolated previously from a feminist standpoint can also be expanded to the Atlantic experience of modernism and modernity. The fact that modernism is usually feminized and women are exiled from the Spanish national territory explains the way in which, once the hysterization of hegemony is articulated by noventayochismo, every subaltern position becomes continuous in the spectrum of otherness and its enjoyment.
National subalternity is another important component common to noventayochismo. Most writers come from peripheral areas of Spain where other nationalisms and political formations are being articulated (Basque Country, Galicia, and Andalusia). In other words, the Generation of 98 comes from areas where Carlism has been hegemonic and the new industrial bourgeoisie does not embrace nationalism; this would partly explain the absence of Catalans in the Generation of 98 as well as their own formulation of a separate modernism.
As Jo Labanyi notes, “[I]t is extraordinary (particularly given that Unamuno, Baroja, and Maeztu were Basques, and all the 1898 writers were from the periphery) that the separatist issue is almost completely missing from their discussions of the national destiny” (132-33). However, if the strong "separatist" component of most noventayochistas’ Spanish national agenda is incorporated into the analysis, in the sense that it contemplates Spain as separate from Europe, modernity, and Latin America, one can begin to perceive why the "regional separatist" issue, a subaltern discourse in Spain, is actively absent from their own "national, separatist, Spanish " hegemonic discourse. If the domestification of noventayochista discourse is effected by hysterizicing women’s position, and its antimodernism is carried out by hysterizing the postcolonial experience of modernity, the (separatist) nationalization of hysteria is attained by appropriating peripheral nationalist ideologies.[6]
It is important to isolate first the ways in which noventayochismo is resistant to nationalist readings in order to grasp the underlying hysterical structure of Spanish nationalism. In the case of Unamuno, the fact that he originally wrote works and articles about Basque language (among others his doctoral dissertation, VI 53-106), defended Basque independence (I 114-18), and then moved on to becoming one of the founding figures of modern Spanish nationalism still remains a fact resisting analysis. This connection was perceived as far back as the 70s. Pérez de la Dehesa already claimed that: "[L]a primera ideología de Unamuno—y esto será una sorpresa para muchos—fue el nacionalismo vasco" (19). But this transformation from Basque to Spanish nationalism is being started to be analyzed only now as a meaningful feature, rather than a regional circumstance, by critics such as Labanyi, Jon Juaristi, Mainer, and María Pilar Rodríguez. However, these studies do not focus on the Unamunian transformation in its historical and nationalist dimensions while accounting for its resistance. Unamuno's nationalist slippery voyage can once again be reinterpreted in the light of male hysteria's hegemonic discourse of phobia and conversion.
Labanyi is the first one establishing clearly and explicitly the connection between Unamuno and nationalism, when she states that: “Unamuno’s dismissive remark that contemporary regionalist aspirations are simply a sign of the advances made towards national unification… is right” (133). She aligns herself with mainstream European nationalist scholarship (Hobsbawn) when backing Unamuno’s claim and thus concluding that “nationalist ideology was first used in the second half of the nineteenth century to justify the incorporation of small units into large ones, only then passing into a converse phase in which the same arguments were used to justify demands for regional secession” (133). Although the later Unamuno presents a phobic relation to peripheral Spanish nationalisms, including the one he had professed in his youth (the Basque), I will defend here that he organizes the hysterical nationalist hegemony of Spain after Basque history and nationalism. This sequence would ultimately reverse the historical order that Labanyi, following Hobsbawn, establishes for centralist and regional nationalisms in Spain.
Originally, Basque nationalism was structured alongside ethnic lines, following sixteenth-century Basque ethnic conceptions of "race and cast" (Juaristi Vestigios). In the Renaissance, defenders of Basque difference or “apologists” resorted to Biblical accounts of the post-Babelic dispersion of tribes and languages to defend Basque exceptionality on ethnic grounds. This old ethnic ideology constitutes the basis for Unamuno’s own development of a hysterical form of racial discourse: casticismo.[7] At the end of his En torno al casticismo, one can see how the old pre-Enlightened understanding of race derived from Basque apologists makes its appearance. However, and unlike in Basque nationalism’s case, Unamuno mixes, in his text, the old Basque ethnic doctrine with newer nineteenth-century racial discourses derived from biology and physical anthropology. As a result, Unamuno’s racial discourse of En torno al casticismo becomes a continuum spanning from the human brain to Spanish imperialist geography:
Es incalculable el efecto sobre nuestra cultura de haber activado la vida periférica de las costas al descubrimiento de América. Como la superficie crece a menor proporción que la masa, en el cerebro se repliega aquella para acrecentarse a medida que crece la complejidad y delicadeza de sus funciones, razón por la que son mayores las circunvoluciones en el cerebro humano que en los de los demás animales, y mayores en el del blanco que en el de razas inferiores. Y bien puede decirse que el tener el europeo más periférico el cerebro que el negro de África es reflejo de tener Europa más perímetro de costa, seis veces más respecto al área que el África. (III 92)
It is paramount to
emphasize that the newer biologist racial discourse deployed by Unamuno makes
its appearance in Spain also through the Basque Country, since the latter
becomes one of the favorite geocultural fetishes of European anthropology. As Joseba Zulaika chronicles, “[T]reinta
años antes de las formulaciones nacionalistas de Arana en Bizcaya por su independencia [founding figure and text of Basque
nationalism] el fundador de la Antropología francesa [Broca] había presentado
en París el resultado de sus investigaciones sobre la raza vasca. Numerosos
antropólogos tomaron parte en el debate. Esta literatura sobre la raza ni fue
iniciada ni internacionalizada por antropólogos vascos” (68).
In a first moment it would seem that Unamuno mobilizes, in a seemingly anachronistic way, two different forms of racial and ethnic discourse. As Zulaika estates, Basque nationalism and its founder, Arana, did not resort to the new anthropological discourse; Arana followed the old Renaissance discourse already accepted in the Basque Country.[8] Thus the double ethnic and racial use is proper only of Unamuno. However, his double and seemingly anachronistic use of two different discourses or registers is due to its ulterior hysterical reorganization. By mobilizing the new biological and anthropological discourse on race, Unamuno phobically rejects Basque nationalism; he reifies it anthropologically as a form of "primitive race in extinction." At the same time, by resorting to the old Basque ethnic discourse of "cast and race," he organizes a new racial discourse, casticismo, that can be applied to Spain through hysterical conversion.
At the same time, because casticismo is phobically set through anthropological racism against other “native and primitive races," such as the Basque, it avoids anthropological reification. Casticismo no longer is another “nativist” discourse of an “underdeveloped race in extinction.” In this way, Unamuno can justify and enjoy a new Spanish ethnic and racial discourse of difference vis-à-vis modernity, postcoloniality, and peripheral nationalisms. Ultimately, when Unamuno hysterically converts Basque nationalist discourse into Spanish casticismo, the latter no longer bears any trace of its historical formation in Basque history and politics.
As Juaristi elaborates, the
difference between Arana and Unamuno is not racial but based on the their uses
of racial or ethnic theories. Whereas Unamuno uses the more modern deployment
of race as biological and natural (outside modern history) alongside the older
ethnic one of cast or civilization, Arana only resorts to the latter. Thus the clash is between a “reified and
objectified race” (Unamuno) and a "historical race or ethnicity"
(Arana): “La irritación que Arana Goiri produce en Unamuno deriva de su
proyecto de convertir a la raza vasca en una raza histórica, en una nación,
cuando precisamente la misión de aquella, según Unamuno, es servir de soporte
intrahistórico a la nación histórica, darle continuidad en el tiempo, ser su
venero de eternidad (el de España y el de él mismo)” (100).[9]
The reason why Unamuno redeploys and converts old Basque ethnic discourses into a new Spanish racial discourse, casticismo, is due to the fact that the menace of modernity was originally formulated by Basque apologists during the Renaissance as a threat to a political body that resisted any historical reading. Because Basque history and reality were derived directly from the aftermath of Babel, argued the sixteenth-century Basque apologists, it preceded any other Spanish group. The "Basque race" was articulated as pre-Spanish and thus originally Spanish (Juaristi, Vestigios 86).[10] Unamuno's claim about Basques being twice Spanish resumes this historical problem. In other words, the pre-Spanish claims by sixteenth-century Basque apologists lead Unamuno to expand them to the entire Spanish nation as a way to resituate it in its “original” historical place. In this way, Basque nationalism is cancelled and its historical discourse of originality is reappropriated by Spanish nationalism: now not only the Basques but all the Spaniards are "original Spaniards."
In this general mobilization of
Basque ethnic theories, one element becomes the centerpiece of Unamuno's
consequent hysteric rearticulation: language, precisely the central element of
the apologists' defense of Basque difference. In order to phobically hysterize
the old Basque "racial" discourse, Unamuno resorts to the linguistic
basis of Spanish imperialism: Castilian language. He proceeds first to erase
the marker that prompts the formation of Basque nationalism, Basque language,
and thus erases all traces of its subaltern Basque origin. He does so by
phobically claiming the death of Basque language in what became the scandal of
the first Juegos Florales of 1901 in
Bilbao. Till that point, the Castilian language had never been a defining and
unifying element of modern imperialist ideology, unlike catholic religion, but
it had been of Basque ethnic differentiation:: “El vascuence se extingue sin
que haya fuerza humana que pueda impedir su extinción; muere por ley de vida. No nos apesadumbre que desaparezca su
cuerpo, pues es para que mejor sobreviva su alma" (VI 298). Zulaika has determined the
racial and imperialist underpinnings of Unamuno's anthropologization and phobic
attack against Basque language. As Zulaika explains, Unamuno follows the
development of modern racism when incorporating the new anthropological
theories:"no estaba pidiendo un acto genocida contra ‘la raza’ vasca, sólo
contra ‘la lengua.’ En el discurso
antropológico de la época…’raza y lengua’ componían el binomio esencial de los
grupos culturales autónomos…. [Unamuno's] relación a la lengua y cultura
nativas adopta la actitud de ‘matarlos’ y ‘enterrarlos’ como obstáculo a la mission civilisatrise de la cultura
europea" (69).
Once Basque reality and nationalism is phobically void of the central
element that supports its historical discourse of difference, then Unamuno
turns this new void Basque subaltern position into the paradigm of Castilian
imperialism, a new form of Spanish imperialism: “Oponen en Inglaterra al pobre
sentido de la little England el vasto
imperialismo del pueblo que habla inglés… tengamos también los vascos nuestro
imperialismo, un imperialismo sin emperador, difusivo y pacífico, no agresivo y
guerrero…. Sobre las razas fisiológicas, basadas en la animalidad, se hacen en
labor secular las razas históricas, cuya sangre es el idioma" (VI, 295-97). In this way Unamuno begins the
hysterical conversion of Basque nationalism and its racial discourse into
Castilian racial discourse: "Esta pérdida [el vasco] habrá de ayudarnos en
nuestra difusión, o invasión, si queréis. … No digáis nunca ni Bilbao para los
bilbaínos, ni Vasconia para los vascos, que al decirlo renegáis de nuestra raza; decid más bien todo para todos. Con nuestro actual impulso puede
llegar lo que se ha llamado la conquista de las mesetas [title of two of his
writings from 1899 included in España y
los españoles] y ¿quién sabe? Mineros de la tierra material hoy, del
subsuelo espiritual de España, lo seamos acaso mañana" (VI 301, my
emphasis). He summarizes this internal imperialist redeployment in his
motto: "antes Castilla ahora la periferia" (VI 297-8). Zulaika
contextualizes historically Unamuno’s move from Basque to Castilian and from
phobic hysteria to conversion hysteria by situating it within the larger frame
of European imperialism: "Aplica el mismo discurso de lo evanescente tanto
a su cultura nativa como a la tradición cristiana y filosófica…. Como ha comentado Said de otro gran escritor,
Albert Camus, también en Unamuno se puede decir que el ethos de universalidad y
humanismo de su obra 'ahora puede ser leído como parte de un debate sobre
cultura e imperialismo'" (70-1).
This conversion of Basque ethnic and racial discourses gives Unamuno’s new
racial theory of casticismo its
hegemonic and resistant character: it is embodied by Castilian imperialism and
its specific literary and historical tradition (the Quixote), but it is not
historical for its origins are located in a historical discourse that defies
Spanish history: Basque nationalism and its discursive genealogy of non-Spanish
difference and origin. Unamuno's casticismo
is located in the landscape of Castile and is defined by its lack of historical
and racial meaning, its hysterical resistance, precisely because its enjoyment
originates in an absent landscape: the Basque Country.
From Rizal and Darío to Pardo Bazán and Arana, the imperialist leftovers of noventayochismo's hegemony secure its enjoyment.[11]
Perhaps with an insight
that was missing among the Spanish Marxist and socialist ranks of the turn of
the century, Unamuno insisted repeatedly that class struggle in Spain was first
and foremost an agrarian problem. As
Pérez de la Dehesa concludes "los múltiples artículos que sobre este tema
escribió Unamuno constituyen una de sus más valiosas aportaciones al
pensamiento socialista español" (64). Once again, Unamuno’s ability
to detect and articulate the real historical problems and sufferings of Spain
was exceptional. However and as Labanyi has summarized, "he promises us culture and gives us nature" (136). Even the
agrarian economic class becomes reappropritated by noventayochismo and then turned into void nature: the landscape of
Castile.
In
a similar way to the case of Basque nationalism, Unamuno departs from a clearly
defined historical and economic reality in Spain: the economic struggles in one
of the regions in which industrial capitalism flourishes but does not organize
itself along nationalist lines, unlike in Catalonia: Vizcaya and its capital
Bilbao. As Pérez de la Dehesa argues: “Los problemas de las tensiones entre ciudad y campo, que tanto le
preocupaban, tenían una base sentimental en su temprana identificación con la
lucha del campesino vasco contra la villa industrial mercantil, causa a sus
ojos de todos los males que manchaban su soñada arcadia” (108). Unamuno
will depart from this other Basque economic reality to phobically hysterize the
Spanish economic problem. Rather than facing class struggle as a capitalist
problem, of which the development of urban, industrial capitalism is an
integral part, Unamuno phobically rejects capitalism and the urban development
that geographically stands for it. Pérez
de la Dehesa perfectly captures Unamuno’s anti-capitalist reaction, which also
becomes an anti-urban phobia and a conversion of ruralism into a new site of
hysterical enjoyment: “En este ruralismo hay restos de una fe romántica en las
virtudes del 'pueblo', y residuos de los prejuicios de la niñez y mocedad de Unamuno
en contra de Bilbao” (108).
Once capitalism and labor are phobically hystericized, then the countryside and agriculture—Castile—become the new social space in which Unamuno’s and noventayochismo’s hysterical conversion takes place. But Unamuno's Castile is void of an economic dimension: it lies outside capitalism and modernity. As Labanyi argues "Even when peasants are shown at work, their labor is abstracted from the network of social and economic relations by being presented as part of a natural scenario" (138).
The only economic reality left in this new Castilian landscape and body is precisely the labor of the noventayochista intellectual. Unamuno becomes the only "Castilian laborer" who, at the same time, is not trapped in the logic of capitalism. He is the only agrarian reality that escapes capitalism. Unamuno deploys a long genealogy of bodies and subjects in order to hysterically convert and embody the agrarian Castile into the new national hearth and dwelling of his discourse and characters—from the Quixote to himself. However, only the hysterical labor of the intellectual, in all its forms—tragedy, agony, polemics—becomes a labor that is acknowledged as such and, at the same time, resists capitalism and modernity.
Interestingly enough, from a feminist point of view, and if this new hysterical articulation is connected with the one established when discussing noventayochismo’s hysterization of women, we must conclude that noventayochismo’s labor is a "domestic labor." This new labor is central to the functioning of national economy, since it becomes its hegemonic discursive articulation, but is not either paid or acknowledged as labor for it hysterically escapes capital. In this sense, this labor is "female labor," or if the following section is incorporated, a very "queer labor." Ultimately, it is labor that only affords ideological enjoyment.
Unamuno also turns his attention to male homosexuality. He reviewed Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," written in the prison to which he was confined after his trail for homosexuality. On the onset, this review could be regarded as anecdotal and without much importance in Unamuno's work and thus noventayochismo's discourse in general. Nevertheless homosexuality comes connected to a series of discursive articulations that are central to noventayochismo. Furthermore, homosexuality's marginality must also be understood in a historical sense: at a moment—the turn-of-the-century—when male homosexuality emerges at the center of art and literature in other nations such as France or England, in Spain it plays a very marginal role, at least till the appearance of Lorca years later.
This textual and historical absence of homosexuality must be connected to the issue I have been discussing so far: the hegemonic and national organization of a form of masculinity that is hysterical and thus has no counterparts in the countries where male homosexuality becomes a (condemned) public and social reality.
As a result of this geocultural difference between Spain and other European countries, one could conclude on a first moment that masculinity's hysterical and hegemonic organization in Spain is rather "queer." Noventayochismo's "queer" yet "hegemonic" discourse, at the same time, would explain why other queer positions, such as homosexuality itself, male and female, do not emerge in turn-of-the-century Spain. In other words, the hegemonic articulation of hysterical masculinity in Spain might have precluded (male) homosexuality from becoming a full-blown social phenomenon as in other countries. In this sense, one could establish that the putative emergence of turn-of-the-century (male) homosexuality was replaced in Spain by a truly queer, albeit not homosexual, position: that of noventayochismo's hysterical masculinity.[12]
When reviewing Wilde's work in 1897, Unamuno calls him "famoso poeta esteta" (VIII 729). Ironically enough, Unamuno's description of the dandy reads almost like a self-portrait: "La pose, la afectación o postura, era el estado habitual de Wilde, cuya alma parece amasada en vanidad. Es, a lo que he oído, de los que sólo admiten que se les admire o se les deteste como artistas. Este hombre había vivido en plena ficción, nutriéndose de fantasmas las naturales ternuras de su espíritu" (VIII 729). Paradoxically, the idea of life as fiction, as posturing, as creating feelings of admiration and hate, was central to Unamuno's own work and life. His infamous confrontation with Millán Astraín in Salamanca on the eve of the Civil War stands out as a rather aesthetic pose. Thus, the main difference between Wilde and Unamuno, is not constituted by their aesthetic fictionality, but rather by the fact that Wilde's fiction is fed by "fantasmas" rather than by some other more "real" or "wholesome" fictions that can nurture "las naturales ternuras de su espíritu" (VII 729).
But this distinction does not serve Unamuno's hegemonic discourse, for Wilde does not pose a threat to the Spanish national territory and its noventayochista stronghold. However, Unamuno "nationalizes Wilde" in order to subject him to his hysterical discourse. Thus, after having phobically rejected and condemned Wilde, Unamuno moves on to finding the same "phantasmatic and aesthetic" presence within the Spanish territory: other national "Wildes," other "estetas nacionales." Then, he single-handedly denounces, judges, and condemns every single "esteta" to forced labor. In other words Unamuno sentences every single Spanish writer suspect of homosexuality to Wilde's fate: "El esteticismo empieza o corroer nuestras letras… ¿No habrá medio de que esos mártires del placer lleguen a serlo del dolor, de un dolor que les purifique y los eleve? ¿No será cosa de pensar seriamente en la manera de ponerles en disposición de que alguno de ellos escriba la balada del presidio de Ceuta o algo por el estilo?" (VIII 731). Once "the martyrs of pleasure" are made to suffer in prison, they no longer constitute a threat to noventayochismo's own literary and cultural enjoyment of its hegemonic articulation. Then Unamuno himself becomes the ultimate "martyr of pleasure" for his fictions are not "phantasmatic," but rather "purified and elevated."
Ironically enough Unamuno himself ends up in exile, confined, few years later as a result of his opposition to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. But at that point, his own exile, so similar to Wilde's, is not fed by phantasms but the "real pleasure" that derives from pain. Unlike Wilde, Unamuno is able to enjoy hysterically the pleasure of aestheticism but without the phantasmatic sexuality that underlies "aesthetic" experience; Unamuno's is purified and elevated. However, it will be necessary to judge, condemn, and sentence to prison every single "Spanish esteta" for Unamuno to hysterically enjoy this queer pleasure, not as queer but as "elevated and purified." Obviously, Unamuno's work, and thus noventayochismo's discourse, always lingers on Castilian camp, which nevertheless never materializes as such, because of its hysterical articulation precisely denies homosexuality (as well as heterosexual female enjoyment).
One could label the subject position created by noventayochismo’s performance “la loca de la nación” while at the same time underscoring the latter’s continuity with the realist figure of “el ángel del hogar.” The Spanish term “loca de la nación,” also connected with the older Golden-Age term of “loca de la casa” in its allegorical meaning of imagination or fiction (in the sense discussed above), is best suited to capture the hysterical nature of masculinity in its connection with queer performance. At the same time, this term challenges Anglo-Saxon theories on queerness and performance by postulating a queer subject position that is both hegemonic and national—a position inexistant in the Anglo-American world of that time.
Furthermore, the archaeology of "la loca/ángel de la nación" can be traced all the way back to the late Spanish writings of Rosalía de Castro, and more specifically, to her novel El caballero de las botas azules (1867). This novel must be hailed as the first text in which the figure of the modernist, intellectual dandy from outside the nation is articulated. It remains to be researched whether Rosalía is the most visible practitioner of a larger literary tradition by women or whether she stands alone--the other figure of dandyism written by a woman, already in the 20th century, is Carmen de Burgos's. If these references are part of a larger women's tradition, one could establish a genealogy of a different mobilization of masculinity for purposes other than the legitimation of a hysterical, male, Castilian, nationalist position. The central character of El caballero, el Duque de la Gloria, already embodies and represents all the characteristics of the hegemonic subject position of noventayochismo, including his resistance to be read, to be given a meaning. As Charnon-Deutsch points out, the resistance begins with el Duque’s wardrobe fetishism: his blue boots. El Duque's footware is a modernist, dandy display that resists scientific analysis, commodification, and thus middle-class culture and positioning ("Blue Beyond").
In Rosalía's case, the character of "la loca de la nación" is used to criticize Spanish nationalism, the upper class, and women’s domesticity. In this respect, the protagonist of her novel belongs to the genealogy of the dandy, as studied by Jessica Feldman. In turn, the Generation of 98 will use the exact same discursive formation for the opposite purpose of reinstating a Spanish, masculine, antimodernist hegemony. In this respect, Rosalía’s work must be hailed as the precursor of an intellectual discourse that will be reappropriated by noventayochismo thirty years later. Furthermore, El Duque comes from without the Spanish nation and, after criticizing it, leaves to go back abroad. His origin and destination are unknown. In closer reading, however, this figure persists throughout Rosalía's work in different formulations. From her first novel, La hija del mar, this a-national figure always comes and goes to the Americas, as the representer of a postcolonial position that somehow announces Darío's arrival some thirty years later under the banner of the same modernist color: the blue.
One final problem remains. If national masculine hysteria reigns hegemonically in turn-of-the-century Spain thanks to noventayochismo, perhaps one must reconsider altogether the gender, sexual, social, and national characteristics of nineteenth-century Spain.
Jagoe affirms that female orgasm
and desire are not denied in nineteenth-century Spanish medical manuals, unlike
in northern Europeans. After
pointing to the importance of the medieval Arab translations of Hypocrites and
Galeno in Spain, which defend female orgasm as constitutive of procreation, she
adds that: "Para la lectora moderna, resulta sorprendente el número de
textos de fisiología del siglo pasado que contienen una discusión explícita del
placer femenino durante el coito y el papel del clítoris en el orgasmo, ya que
solemos creer que este último se 'descubrió' en la segunda mitad del siglo XX
[Kinsey, Masters and Johnson]" (315).
If Jagoe's affirmation is indicative of nineteenth-century Spanish sexuality, one must account for the coexistence of marginalized female desire side by side with hegemonic male hysteria. If this coexistence does take place, then perhaps the national and heterosexual formation proper to the bourgeois classes of northern European countries, as theorized among others by Foucault, does not apply to the Spanish case. It remains to be reexamined if Thomas Laqueur’s account of the transformation of the one-sexed model into the two-sexed one at the end of the eighteenth century applies to Spain. Perhaps, the one-sexed model continues in a different historical development throughout the nineteenth century in Spain.
The hypothetical continuity of such single-sexed model could in turn explain the aforementioned coexistence of both male and female desire, as perhaps national-hegemonic and exilic respectively, but as part of one single sex nevertheless. Furthermore this hypothesis could explain the hegemonic and privileged position, a very queer position, occupied by hysteria, as a solely male privilege in Spanish culture. At the same time this could explain the para-national or post-national position of most women writers, from Fernán Caballero and Gómez de Avellaneda to Castro and Pardo-Bazán, so that their national exile keeps them separate from masculinity's hysterical and hegemonic mobilization, but does not hystericize them and, thus, allows them to develop an intellectual voice. Perhaps hysteria, unlike in northern Europe, is not a technology mobilized around women and, then, reappropriated by them, but rather the privilege of an older masculinity, which at the same time exiles women, other peripheral nations, postcolonials, queers, and agrarian workers, and turns them into the leftover or surplus of its own hegemonic enjoyment. Perhaps the bodies and desires of all these subaltern positions are not cloistered to different spaces within the national territory—domestic, peripheral, lower class—but exiled outside or to the periphery of the national hegemony.
Perhaps this is why, in our own turn-of-the-century, these subaltern positions still have a hard time reclaiming their own identities and desires, their enjoyment. Perhaps that is why identity politics in Spain—feminism, nationalism, queer activism, worker mobilization, and immigrants' rights—cannot afford to enjoy its name yet. This would probably be a sad consequence of noventayochismo's legacy but also the opportunity to think other forms of politics beyond identity.
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[1] Even the "creation of the concept" derives from this
activity. Although Azorín is reputed to have coined the term, E. Inman Fox and
Vicente Cacho Viu conclude that its origin derives from another polemic between
Maeztu and Ortega y Gasset in 1908, which began right after "La semana
trágica" (28-30). In short, one could conclude that the invention of noventayochismo is also part of its
performative and hysterical articulation.
[2] Once the hegemonic male hysterical position is
isolated as the central subject position of the Generation of 98, its formation
can be archaeologically reconstructed in pre-98 literature. More specifically,
Galdós’s post-Fortunata y Jacinta
phase (1888-98), with characters such as Orozco in Realidad and La incógnita,
already anticipates the noventayochista
construction of hegemonic hysterical masculinity. As Lou Charnon-Deutsch points
out male hysterical characters are central to these Galdósian novels in the
sense that they are obsessed with hysteria (177).
[3] London remains conspicuously absent from most Latin
American accounts.
[4] Darío clearly contrasts
Barcelona to Madrid: "Llegué a Barcelona y mi impresión fue lo más
optimista posible. Celebré la vitalidad, el trabajo, lo bullicioso y
pintoresco, el orgullo de las gentes de empresa y conquista, la energía del
alma catalana, tanto en el soñador, que siempre es un poco soñador… ciertos
rincones montmartrescos, de las alegres ramblas y de las voluptuosas
mujeres" (169).
[5] It is interesting to contrast Unamuno's reaction to
Wilde with Galdós's actual encounter with the English writer in Paris in 1900.
Galdós is not threatened by Wilde and rather seems to be fascinated with the
latter. When Enrique Gómez Carrillo introduces Galdós to Wilde, Galdós only
objects to the presentation itself. He prefers to remain anonymous so that he
can continue observing the queer subject: "A mí me gusta mirar sin que me
miren" (Ortiz-Armengol 569). There is an affinity between Galdós and Wilde
that the arrival of noventayochismo
interrupts and outlaws.
[6] Cinema is precisely invented in 1895. The way Castile
is portrayed in 98 is very much cinematic although the gaze becomes mystical
and absent. In this respect noventayochismo's
travels and chronicles could be characterized as "cine
intrahistórico" or "antimodern gaze."
[7] Unamuno refers explicitly to the Basque sixteenth
century in En torno al casticismo
(III 93). This reference is a sign that Unamuno was fully aware of the origins
of Basque nationalism’s racial discourse.
[8] As Zulaika adds ”La
teoría dominante de Broca [founder of modern physical anthropology] de que los
vascos descendían del Cromañón podía ser utilizada perfectamente por el
exclusivismo racista de Arana. Después de todo, era la autoridad de la
"ciencia" la que había hablado. Pero, de hecho, Arana nunca menciona
esta literatura científica más que genéricamente; su noción de "raza"
no es la de la antropología racialista… Arana utiliza estas nociones de raza y
sangre en el sentido tradicional de descendencia de grupo linaje, comparable a la
noción de "gens" de Morgan” (68).
[9] Juaristi has analyzed this transition and the way in
which Unamuno retakes a Basque structure of melancholia to redefine Spanish
nationalism. The Oak of Guernica became the fuerista
symbol of Basque history and difference: “Al dar la muerte al árbol de Guernica
en el poema de 1880, Unamuno lleva a cabo en sí mismo una abolición foral: la
abolición de los fueros de la melancolía…. la desaparición de la melancolía
fuerista permite a Unamuno emprender una trayectoria autónoma, construirse a sí
mismo no ya como epígono de Trueba y Arana, sino como un escritor con voz
propia. Tardaría todavía mucho en encontrar un símbolo adecuado para esta
autroconstrucción (lo va a hallar, evidentemente, en el Quijote)" (78).
[10] Juaristi explains the most
radical form of apology for Basque difference, that of Poza, in the following
way: "El tratado de Poza tiene, por tanto, un alcance distinto del de
otras apologías de las lenguas peninsulares escritas a lo largo del siglo XVI…
representa la usurpación de la mitografía judeoespañola y de la Cábala por la
clase escriba vizcaína. Del libro de Poza se desprende que Dios eligió revelar
su propia naturaleza al linaje de Túbal [the Basques], y que tal revelación fue
superior a la primera o edénica, contenida en el hebreo. Al infundir esta
lengua en Adán, Dios le hizo partícipe de algunos de sus misterios, pero el
grado de tal revelación fue inferior al de la revelación babélica contenida y
plasmada en el vasco. Esta última lengua vendría a ser una especie de
protoevangelio en que se despliega una teodicea trinitaria. El vasco--afirma
tácitamente Poza--es más perfecto que el hebreo como lengua y filosofía
teológica. La religión de Babel es ya más cumplida y verdadera que la del
Sinaí, y los vascos, el auténtico pueblo
elegido" (Vestigios 86, my
emphasis).
[11] In Unamuno’s representation of the Quixote, San Juan
de la Cruz, and later on, San Manuel, male characters perform the national
body’s racial resistance to history: they are the new embodiment of a casticismo that is historically Basque. Referring to the Quixote,
Unamuno concludes: "El héroe leyendario y novelesco es, como el histórico,
individualización del alma de un pueblo, y como quiera que obran, existen. Del
alma castellana brotó Don Quixote, vivo como ella" (III 172). However, the encounter between the Vizcaino and Don
Quixote in Cervantes's novel suddenly takes a very different turn after
Unamuno: the "vizcaino" recognizes his own kind and thus takes Don
Quixote seriously in his fantastic claims. The vizcaino is the only character
in the novel who believes in the latter's fiction because, centuries later,
this very same fiction will become the discoursive engine that will deprive the
vizcaino of his history and reality.
[12] The fact that a middle-class heterosexuality did not
become hegemonic in Spain would also have to be accounted for in order to
explain the absence of (male) homosexuality.