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BEYOND WORDS: THE NATIONAL SUBLIME AND THE SPANISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE IN EL SECRETO DEL REY CAUTIVO AND UN DÍA DE CÓLERA

2010; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14636204.2010.513140

1469-9818

Antonio Gómez López Quiñones,

Hispanic-African Historical Relations

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I am aware of the different implications of “the War of Independence” and “the Peninsular War”. In this essay, I will use both terms interchangeably in order to avoid the constant tedious repetition of mentioning both each time. 2. Ricardo García Cárcel García Cárcel , Ricardo. El sueño de la nación indomable. Los mitos de la guerra de la independencia . Madrid : Temas de Hoy , 2007 . [Google Scholar], Miguel Artola, Rafael Abella and Javier Nart, Ronald Fraser, Henry Kamen Kamen, Henry. 2008. Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity, New Haven: Yale UP. [Google Scholar], Charles Esdaile Esdaile , Charles J. Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits, and Adventures in Spain, 1808–1814 . New Haven : Yale UP , 2004 . [Google Scholar], Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos, Jena-René Aymes, and Emilio de Diego García, to mention just a few, have published historiographical investigations on the Peninsular War in recent years. 3. These Playmobil toys were originally exhibited at the Fifth Feria Nacional de Coleccionistas de Playmobil at La Casa de Campo (Madrid), organized by the Playclicks-Asociación Española de Colecionistas de Playmobil. Individual pieces of the thematic series have been on sale in many internet forums, such as Ebay (see http://cgi.ebay.es/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370082272540&indexURL=). 4. In the context of Peninsular studies, see Moreiras Moreiras Menor, Cristina. 2002. Cultura herida. Literatura y cine en la España democrática, Madrid: Libertarias. [Google Scholar], Subirats Subirats, Eduardo. 1993. Después de la lluvia. Sobre la ambigua modernidad española, Madrid: Temas de Hoy. [Google Scholar] and, more recently, Labanyi Labanyi , Jo. “The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9 . 2 2008 : 119 25 [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]. 5. Delgado's, Resina Resina , Joan Ramon . Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural . Madrid : Biblioteca Nueva , 2009 . [Google Scholar]'s, Gabilondo's and Bermúdez's essays are part of a special edition published by the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos in 2003. 6. In the past few years, a considerable number of novels on this topic have been published, among them: Antonio Ruiz Pozuelo's El afrancesado, José Calvo Poyato's Vientos de intriga, Ángeles de Isarri's La artillera, Julio Albi's La gran cifra de París, Rafael Torres's España contra España, Francisco Márquez Hidalgo's El abanico de nácar, Antonio Carmona's Los hijos de la discordia, José Luis Corral's ¡Independencia!, Rafael Pérez Pérez Garzón , Juan Sisinio. Las Cortes de Cádiz. El nacimiento de una nación liberal (1808–1824) . Madrid : Síntesis , 2007 . [Google Scholar] y Pérez's El lobo de la falconera, Bocero de la Rosa's La derrota, Alfonso Contrera Fernández's Guerra de la Independencia. Primer acto, and Arturo Pérez Reverte's La sombra del Águila. These novels are only the latest in a long tradition of literary approaches to the war against Napoleon's troops (Manuel José Quintana, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Espronceda, Hartzenbusch, Zorrilla, Alarcón, Galdós, Baroja, among others). 7. Although Burke's conclusions are associated with empiricist positions, Burke walks a very fine line. On the one hand, he meticulously describes the indispensable attributes of any beautiful and sublime object; on the other, he constructs a theory in which sublimity and beauty are not intrinsic characteristics of physical entities, but feelings that originate in the interaction between phenomena and human cognitive apparati. Joel Weinsheimer Weinsheimer, Joel. 1993. Eighteen-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke, New Haven: Yale UP. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] has investigated the influence of the founder of British empiricism, John Locke, on Burke's philosophy. 8. As the prefacer to the Oxford University Press edition explains, this text is sufficiently ambiguous as to be “used to support diametrically opposed political positions” (Phillips Phillips , Adam. “Introduction.” A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . By Edmund Burke. Oxford : Oxford UP , 1990 . ix xxiv . [Google Scholar] xiii). 9. Thirty-three years earlier (the period of time that passed by between the publication of A Philosophical Enquiry's and Reflections), Burke had written about the concept of “astonishment”, “that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended” (Philosophical 53), much more positively, almost with a concealed admiration. This conceptual esteem for the uncompromising, ground-breaking, nerve-racking power of the sublime vanishes and gives way to rejection. 10. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant establishes his epistemological theses around the categories of understanding (commonly known as Kant's “transcendental turn”). In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), he articulates his moral theory of the categorical imperative, and in the third Critique he tries to restore the unity of Reason and of his own project. Kant had published a previous volume on the topic, Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). 11. The sensation of the beautiful results from a type of disinterested aesthetic judgment in which both the categories of the understanding and the imagination's capacity to apprehend forms collaborate with each other. The pleasure derived from the beautiful is directly linked to the mind's free evaluation of forms. This judgment is not universal and necessary because of the presence of certain features in a particular object, but because of a “subjective universality” (Kant Critique 10), that is, a transcendental “common sense” (Kant Critique 35) that does not originate from any learning or socializing process. This common sense is an a priori principle of any single human being's mental life. 12. Kant's trascendentalism disregards Burke's effort to describe the built-in characteristics of those objects that are considered beautiful or sublime. According to Kant, these two concepts do not refer to Nature, but to the internal relationship between the three faculties of the mind: understanding, imagination and reason. 13. It would be impossible (and it is not the goal of this paper) to explain the many and heterogeneous types of communal organization we can find in modern political theory. If I favor Spinozian republicanism over other significant alternatives, it is due only to the fact that, in my opinion, this political option can play a useful and instrumental role in illuminating the most problematic elements of Gómez Rufo's and Pérez-Reverte's nationalistic leanings and preferences. 14. Milton Azevedo Azevedo , Milton. “An Alien Rumble: Satire through Language Simulation in Two Novels by Arturo Pérez-Reverte” Hispania 90 . 1 2007 : 453 61 [Google Scholar] has detected a kind of pattern in Pérez Reverte's novels in which war and violence can play an important role: “Several recurring elements give them [Reverte's novels] a clear family resemblance. One of these is action, as there is hardly anything contemplative in the Revertian worldview, where serious reflection on the human condition springs from often violent action in which overwhelming odds threaten a hero or heroine” (453). 15. Un día de cólera is a complex narrative experiment in which several novelistic traditions converge. This is, according to Pablo Restrepo Restrepo , Pablo. “Mediadoras y pérdida de la memoria histórica en La piel del tambor, de Arturo Pérez-Reverte.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 32 . 1 2007 : 177 87 . [Google Scholar], one of the key aspects of this writer's success: “Pérez-Reverte Pérez-Reverte, Arturo. 2007. Un día de colera, Madrid: Alfaguara. [Google Scholar] entra en el juego de la posmodernidad y, por lo tanto, no sorprende que mezcle estos subgéneros que se originan en el siglo XIX, con técnicas aprendidas de la experimentación del siglo XX” (165). 16. Andrián Pérez-Melgosa Pérez-Melgosa , Adrián . “Presentes imperfectos: la pugna entre realismo y post-modernismo en las novelas de Arturo Pérez-Reverte.” Sobre héroes y libros. La obra narrativa y periodística de Arturo Pérez-Reverte . Jose Belmonte Serrano and José Manuel López de Abiada Murcia : Nausícaa , 2003 . 331 43 . [Google Scholar] has correctly noted that in many of Pérez-Reverte's novels “el pasado se nos presenta como ejemplar, genuino y superior, en contraste con un presente de la narración en él que sólo algunos personajes que se aferran a usos y normas del pasado se salvan de la esencia impura, inferior y degradada que rezuma la contemporaneidad por cada uno de su poros” (334). Un día de cólera also participates in the idealization of a more pure, intense, and authentic time that works as the foundational moment of the national community. 17. Kant himself explicitly articulates the connection between the sublime and the categorical moral imperative in a long and important section of Critique of Judgment, “General Remarks upon the Exposition of the Aesthetical Reflective Judgment”. 18. I am aware of the fact that the distinction between the nation as an essential goal in itself and the nation as a geopolitical framework to promote a political agenda is basically a heuristic and analytical distinction. Although both projects tend to get entangled, this is an important distinction we should not completely abandon since it has explanatory potential. There are historical situations, not necessarily or exclusively war situations, in which “the nation is the only goal worthy of pursuit—an assertion that often leads to the belief that the nation demands unquestioned and uncompromising loyalty” (Grosby Grosby , Steven Elliot. Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford : Oxford UP , 2005 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] 5). There are other contexts in which the emphasis is put on “the nation as a particular type of society” (Grosby Grosby , Steven Elliot. Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford : Oxford UP , 2005 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] 5), that is, the nation as an operational structure for some ideological values or political institutions that are going to articulate a society (for instance, a constitutional, democratic, participatory or equalitarian model of governance and social organization). 19. The success of the Spanish national soccer team in the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa has inspired all manner of popular celebrations, political instrumentalization and critical responses. Newspapers, such El Mundo, ABC and El País, have emphasized how these celebrations have a special political meaning and implication when they take place in cities such as Bilbao and Barcelona.