Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dynamiting Don Quijote : literature, colonial memory and the crisis of the national subject in the monumental poetics of the Cervantine tercentenary (Spain 1915–1921)

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14701847.2014.924217

1470-1847

Germán Labrador Méndez,

History, Culture, and Diplomacy

AbstractThis paper analyzes the effects of the commemorative cycle of the tercentenary of Don Quijote (1905–1915) in the context of the crisis of the Spanish Restoration (1917–1923). Literary figures such as Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Rafael Cansinos Assens, and Manuel Azaña understood this cycle as the symbolic response of Alphonsine culture to the "Disaster of '98." These writers used Quixotist material in the work that they published at the very beginning of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in an attempt to narrate the Restoration's crisis of legitimacy in a Civic Republican tone. These narratives required the production of a memory critical of the colonial project, on the one hand, and the deconstruction of the commemorative regime that had restrained it, on the other. The anti-nationalist criticism of Quixotist memorialization (and, in an exemplary fashion, of the Monument to Cervantes in Madrid's Plaza de España) is tied to the iconoclastic imagination of an emancipated political community. In the works of these writers this political imagination is constructed through the analysis of the subaltern character in some early twentieth-century Spanish popular identities understood as Quixotist, that is, as subjectivities pervaded by the violent contradictions of the Brumairian poetics of National Quixotism.Keywords:: Spanish nationalismsites of memoryValle-InclánGeneration of '98iconoclasmDon Quijote's tercentenaryQuixotismsubalternity Notes 1. This text has been translated from Spanish by Lisa K. Hirschmann, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Princeton University, USA. 2. Muguruza occupied a central place as an ideologist of the New State due to his understanding of architecture's ideological role (Box Citation2009, 362). He commissioned the construction of the Valle de los Caídos. Coullaut died in 1932, but before that he completed important Sacred Heart monuments (Cerro de los Ángeles and Bilbao) and statues of conservative intellectuals such as Menéndez Pelayo or Pardo Bazán. I have not had the chance to reconstruct the trajectory of the last architect of the monument, Martínez Zapatero. 3. Fables of national-military masculinity summon a memory of Empire and its dead. In Zorrilla, Don Juan appears before his victims in order to establish the moral limits of a bio-power after indicating those of a geo-power: between the first and second parts of the work, Don Juan is forgiven for his crimes by Emperor Carlos V himself, just when Don Juan and the Spanish Empire find themselves at a point of maximum expansion. Thus, the decline of national military strength is made to coincide with that of the masculine political subject (and its sexual vigor) in the memorial daydream that Zorrilla thinks up for the eighteenth-century Spanish culture. In a way, the symbolic re-armament of Spanish imperialism at the close of the century breaks with the pact of memory that the donjuanista myth had established with the victims of its hierarchical violence, with the domestic costs of its outward display. In Los cuernos de Don Friolera, we again witness a crossing of the public military and the private honor allegorized in Don Juan, accelerated by National Quixotism's regime of representation. Regarding the depth of the donjuanista roots in connection with subaltern memory, imperial violence and mourning, see Roach (Citation1996). 4. R. de la Flor (Citation2002, 218–30) has studied how the Melancholic Mars created the emblems used to give expression to Spanish military decadence (1630–1680) from the time of Velázquez. I am interpreting the return, now maniacal, of Don Quixote as part of this lineage in what is an expression of the Spanish military debacle on the international stage. This Don Quixote has taken on some saturnine traits, including infanticide. If Goya's rendition of Cronus corresponds to the expression of a modern way of catastrophically inhabiting history, after 1898 this Don Quixote alludes to the complex national (dis)embodiment in the time of modern imperialism. 5. In reading Don Quijote, they "learn" to forget the past horrors of the conquest; the vertical violence of memory (whose weight is so clearly represented here) is transferred to the horizontal violence of reading. It is a formal, compositional argument: in a beautiful game of "bearing and false-bearing" – the physical weight of the globe alone is transferred horizontally onto the statues, while it is, in reality, the central pillar that supports it, generating that strange sensation of heaviness and lightness that takes over the whole ensemble. For an empirical verification, it is enough to consider the group blocking the view of the globe's presence. 6. According to its original design, upon the globe, a winged Victory would rule, but it was never constructed. It remained among the blueprints (Coullaut Citation1916). This insignia of a Hispania caput mundi, which is here monumentalized under the sign of Don Quijote, tried to extend itself on the monumental stage in the Spanish American capitals. Thus, initiatives for the collection of funds for the construction of Cervantine monuments like the one in Colombia were promoted (Yepes Citation1998). 7. Monumentalization that directly represents the events of the Cuban War is scarce. The little that exists consists of monuments constructed in honor of the heroes (officials like Lieutenant Ruiz; generals like Martínez Campos, Contreras or Weyler) (Cabezón Citation1990). The monument to the Heroes of Cuba, erected in the Parque del Oeste and destroyed during the Battle of Madrid, is worth mentioning. Finally, in 1902 the statue of the Hero of Cascorro, in Madrid's Rastro, which rescued the individual name Eloy Martínez from the mass of anonymous dead, suggested that the immaterial compensation of the patria's gratitude could reach even the last of its soldiers, reordering generals and troops for posterity according to the aristocracy of the spirit: statues for all, but one by one – death's horizontality. 8. Cerdá emphasized the argument that the costs of the 1898 war were not symbolized in convenient fashion. In his novel, as the nation is preparing to enter the Great War, we read: "Esto de los himnos había preocupado mucho á la Junta organizadora, ¿Cuál era el himno español? […] La Marcha de Cádiz había sucumbido con nuestro imperio colonial. Fue la víctima expiatoria […]. ¡No supimos á quién fusilar, y dimos garrote vil al emocionante ¡Viva España! […] ¡España, por carecer de todo, carecía hasta de himno nacional!" (Citation1915, 34–5). Doceañista (1812-inspired) nationalism, which was Republican, not Quixotist or colonialist, was the victim of the "Disaster" then: from 1898 until 1931 it appeared to be excluded as a possible pathway for national construction. Cerdá's novel would amount to an attempt to come to terms with the terrible consequences that Quixotism, like compensatory nationalism or Lerroux's populism, could have for the nation. 9. "Y ese lirismo, esta exaltación, esta inconsciencia (que envía millares y millares de hombres a muerte en las colonias, o que, sobre las tablas escénicas, produce bárbaros y absurdos asesinatos), esto es lo que encontramos en la obra del señor Echegaray. Y precisamente esa exaltación y ese lirismo es lo que se pretende conmemorar ahora, cuando ha pasado el Desastre, cuando vamos abriendo los ojos a la experiencia dolorosa" (Azorín Citation1962, 1104).10. The iconoclastic violence directed at the statues of the "triangle of discovery" in 1909 in Barcelona (Lahuerta Citation1999), or towards that of Barroso and Castillo in Córdoba in 1919, signals the existence of a popular sensibility unwilling to be convinced by tales that glorified the suffering produced by the wars overseas for the sake of stone.11. The theoretical subtext of this article is an attempt to study Quixotism using Marx's notion of aesthetic overlap. As Didi-Huberman (Citation2008) argues in his reading of Benjamin, modernity's main problem in the relation between aesthetics and politics is the historic imagination. This is also the theoretical and poetic core of The 18thBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which Marx analyzes the failure of the popular revolution of 1848, observing the way in which its actors, nervous as they put forward a politics never seen before, at the moment of "revolutionizing themselves and things […] borrow from spirits of the past in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language" (Citation1852, 15). It is the conflict between the inevitable aesthetic return of the forms associated with an imaginary of history and its incapacity to provide the contents of a new present, producing ghosts. Quixotism intensifies the Brumairian syndrome: Quixotism not only expresses per se, as myth, the impossible tension between the aesthetics of dead generations (novels of chivalry) and the reality in transformation belonging to the imperial modernity of the seventeenth century (windmills as avant-garde technologies). As an articulation of post-98 Spanish nationalism, it also fulfills the Brumairian condition of being an insert of the historic imaginary for the representation and understanding of the present. That process generates Brumairian identities ("The nation feels like that mad Englishman in Bedlam who fancies that he lives in the times of the ancient Pharaohs" [17]). What is novel about the Spanish case is that this syndrome, rooted in modernity itself, produces a specific theory and monumental memorial practice within the State that almost celebrates those identities.12. These claims are based on Agustina Monasterio Baldor's promising current research on the subject.13. The notion of rapture, whose conceptual background is of mystical origin (De Certeau Citation1982), is used here as a way of putting the notions of interpellation, identity and language in relation to one another within a Quixotist frame. The classic raptures of Don Quixote, maniacal episodes in which the hidalgo finds himself completely determined by the discursive logic of his character, are the shared element of this new type of possession. This rapture is experienced in the long tradition of Quixotizing characters that mark the modern Spanish novel: for example, Víctor Quintanar, Ana Ozores's husband, in Clarín's La Regenta (1884–1885), and Ana herself; Galdós' characters Father Nazario (Nazarín, 1895), and Ramón Villamil (Miau, 1888), all at the end of their respective novels; or Unamuno's Arturo Pérez before his death in Niebla (1914). Don Friolera also experiences a Quixotist rapture at the end of Los cuernos.14. The matter of the removal of monuments is a hot topic in the memorialistic politics of the Second Republic, accelerated by the iconoclastic violence of the war. In this regard, by democratic decision of the municipal council, it was decreed that the statue of the Sacred Heart of Bilbao (another work by Collaut) was to be demolished, which gave rise to a series of prayer vigils to make amends and to protest (Estornes Citation2011).