See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/283343141 2013 «Interliterariness and the Literary Field: Catalan Literature an Literatures in Catalonia», en Joan Ramon Resina (ed.): Iberian Modalities, Liverpool; Liverpool UP., 2013; pp.... CHAPTER · JANUARY 2013 1 AUTHOR: Antoni Marti Monterde University of Barcelona 59 PUBLICATIONS 1 CITATION SEE PROFILE Available from: Antoni Marti Monterde Retrieved on: 12 November 2015
Interliterariness and the Literary Field: Catalan Literature and Literatures
in CataloniaAntoni Martí Monterde
Nearly a century ago, in an opuscule entitled Momentum Catastroficum, Pío Baroja made an assertion upon which we must meditate in various
ways: “If Catalonia separates from Spain, within fifty years it will be spiritually French” (55). Independent of his motivations, the thing that most attracts our attention in Baroja’s affirmation (which in no way can be understood simply as a boutade) is his ability to do something that Catalans have scarcely done for some time: that is, to think about our literary, intellectual, political, and edito-rial culture, once independence from Spain has been achieved. This issue cannot be assumed to go without saying, nor may we postpone its consideration until independence has been effectively achieved. We cannot subordinate it to the fact that independence has not already been achieved (or that it may never be achieved), nor can we assume that once the other dimensions of the matter have been resolved, literature may, in the end, have little importance. While literature (culture in general) no longer occupies what was once a central place in the constitution of societies, this fact paradoxically does not prevent the literary field in Catalonia from being simultaneously the stage and the object of some of the most ardent political debates of recent years. Suffice it to say that the Catalan case is not exceptional in Europe, and thus its study should be liber-ated from the dramatics with which it is often discussed. But we must also take a step forward to situate it in this European context of reflection, which makes it intelligible. Precisely because of this, we must think about the relationships between Catalan literature and the literatures of its vicinity – Spanish, Iberian, and European on one plane, and Western and world on the other – once the moment of genuine political independence arrives. This is because with the future establishment of Catalonia as an independent state in the heart of the European Union, many things will have changed in this country, but others will not. People will continue speaking the same languages and they will continue writing the same literature, or literatures.
In reality, it is not very difficult to think about Catalonia in the terms in which Baroja did. This is what has been done (in a logical manner) for a long time
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 62 20/11/2012 15:10
Interliterariness and the Literary Field 63
and (I should point out) it is the way in which we think of it today. We must take up the evidence that he himself also points out: “I, for example, do not feel any hostility for the people of the Mediterranean, even though the Catalans have accused me of this, but I also do not have a spiritual fellowship with their writers and artists” (Momentum 53). That is to say, there is not within him a feeling of belonging to a same “community,” a “unique shared spirit.” I need not point out that Baroja was not precisely a supporter of Catalan independ-ence. In fact he raises another important issue: that Catalan culture might not resist, in the European framework, absolute assimilation – and thus dissolution – into another culture, the French. Furthermore, and up to a certain point, the situation of Catalan culture in Roussillon (French Catalonia) proves him right. This, however, did not prevent him from making some very clear prospective hypotheses stemming not from mistrust, or from the debate itself, but having, rather, their basis in a very deep understanding of Catalan literature, of what it means to be a Catalan writer – whether he writes in Catalan or in Castilian, the language in which Baroja read Catalan writers. This fact is important because writing in Castilian did not convert those writers, from his point of view, into Spanish writers; nor did he perceive two literatures in Catalonia. Regardless of whether they wrote in Catalan or Castilian, whether he based his opinion on a deep or superficial understanding, he obtained from Catalan writers a clear perception of one of their predominant characteristics: their writing was, in many ways, an extension of French letters.
In this light, these provocative words share an approach (though not the same conclusions) with Joan Fuster’s aphorism about Xènius: “¿Eugeni d’Ors? Yes, man! That old French right-wing intellectual!” (Judicis Finals 64). D’Ors was as French as Fuster himself: that conservative left-wing French intellectual, capable of rewriting, against Eugeni d’Ors, the Glossari, in the same way that the Glossari was already a rewriting, against Voltaire, of the Dictionnaire philosophique portatif. This is just one example of many that could be provided in a sequence that would define Catalan literary tradition (with the necessary Maragallian-Goethian nuances) at least until the 1960s. But more than anything it refers to the period that runs between the end of the nineteenth century and 1936. “Preliminary profession of faith: Vive la France!” These words of Josep Maria Junoy (1) define very well the genesis of our contemporary letters, regard-less of the aesthetic or political preferences of those who sign or underwrite them. This is because, in that moment, to be a Catalan writer means to have read certain books, to administer a relationship – in personal literary terms but also in collective and cultural ones – that is cemented into every book, on every page. These readings include the predominant French literature of the eighteenth century (especially the Enlightenment), nineteenth-century realist prose, and the avant-garde and memorialist essays of the first third of the
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 63 20/11/2012 15:10
Institutionalizing Iberian Studies64
twentieth century. After the fin de siècle, the French literary, intellectual, and editorial environment also filtered the reading of other European literatures – mostly Scandinavian and Russian, but also German (although the latter was accessed more directly). Through these readings, more than through reflection on the Catalan literary tradition itself, a new cycle began to emerge that built the foundations of contemporary Catalan literature, and that began to establish a tradition.
In the case of Catalonia, this international dimension would be, besides, a very particular expression of that which Hannah Arendt called “rupture of tradition,” insofar as contemporary Catalan writers do not feel obliged to recog-nize the authority of a tradition in order to relate to one. This is because they do not write from a fixed historical point on the chronological continuum (and, we would add, on the geographical one), but enter into a spiritual realm where everything is contemporary – and, from our perspective, also geographically close – in order to constitute the writing of the present as a tradition.
Literary fields are always national; and internationality – including the internal debates about cosmopolitanism and universalism, even (or most of all) in France – does not supersede but forms an important part of the national constitution of the fields (Bourdieu “Les conditions sociales”; Espagne and Werner; Jurt). The internationality of literatures can be understood as their diffusion or reverberation outside of their territory (insofar as the territory and the literature are defined as national), but that only explains the matter in one direction. The other essential but infrequently considered direction, almost always preceding, is the way in which a literature becomes constitu-tively conscious of other traditions. This reality runs much deeper than what the actual relationships, documentable through procedures employed in the comparative history of literatures, tend to show. Some have a propensity to think that this is so only in literatures of minor dimension and limited presence in the international field, but it is also exactly the same in the so-called major literatures – those with clearly developed and solid systems. “Connecting links in literatures cannot always be explained by the concept of a nation, or by language” (Lambert, “In Quest” 69), be these what they may. Literatures do not constitute, in linguistic terms, closed and homogeneous systems of communi-cation. Interaction with other types of communication (literary or not), of local or international origin, occurs all the time, to the point that, as the comparatist Leuven sees it, every society implies the coexistence of diverse literary tradi-tions in any sociocultural space. Now, this evidence does not mean the same thing in all of the places in which it could be analyzed. It does not develop in the same way in France as in Spain, in Belgium or in Germany, in Catalonia or in Austria, in England or in the United States, nor does it mean the same thing in every historical moment in the countries I have used here as an example, nor in
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 64 20/11/2012 15:10
Interliterariness and the Literary Field 65
their combined relations. Milan Kundera has referred to this while discussing the provincialisms of the old and the young as different manifestations of the same incapacity to think of oneself in a broad context.
The fact that Catalan literature is a literature without state backing, even though its literary force and critical mass are much greater than those of many European national/state literatures, turns out in this case to be extremely important; but so too is the fact (also affecting the aggregate of literatures backed by a nation state) that the definition of European literature, practically normative even today, is based on the five great literatures with which Ferdi-nand Brunetière defined European literature in 1900, and with practically the same criteria. Works such as Précis de litterature européenne (2002) follow this format, reserving for the “Place of Regional Literatures in Europe” seven sad pages, botched by Jean-Paul Barbe, about those literatures called regional. It appears irrelevant that some of the literatures mentioned there, such as Catalan literature, could be situated in all aspects alongside others that have been given their own chapter, such as Dutch. In spite of all that, in this same Précis, János Szávai is able to propose the necessity of a “European literature that does not limit itself to the common languages,” as a way of thinking about a slightly more egalitarian, less arbitrary Republic of Letters. The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova (1999), a book that continues to generate debate, is the latest relevant contribution to this way of establishing diachronic hierarchies in international literary space through the synchronic compulsion to renew a no longer practicable centrality of French literature.
In this sense, one of the roles that Catalan literature can play is that of challenging these inertias with the double evidence of its European and Europe-anist dimension. Neither by tradition, nor by consequence, nor by circumstances does the international dimension of Catalan literature inevitably pass through the Iberian peninsula, nor can it be limited to that space. If we are to limit Catalan literature to the peninsula, we can only do so politically. Even in those moments when it was most difficult for international circulation of ideas to cross the Pyrenees, Catalan literature was not limited to the Iberian peninsula. But the autonomy of the Catalan literary field does not function as an inten-tional substitute for independence – in which case the consequent effect would be a feeling of a feasible liberation in the literary or intellectual fields, but not in the political one. One may speak of a double position for Catalan literature. In terms of its systemic development, it is, historically, just another European literature. Catalan literature is equipped with an intellectual field in which Europeanism is not an affirmation but a condition. It is a literature among literatures, as Fuster would say (Literatura 143), in which the role of transla-tions – into Catalan and most of all from Catalan – would be fundamental. In systemic terms, it would be neither a defective nor a dependent system; or in
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 65 20/11/2012 15:10
Institutionalizing Iberian Studies66
any case it would be so in the same way that many other European literatures are with regard to the French, German, or English traditions. On this point, Catalan literature would be like Swiss, Hungarian, Polish, or Dutch literature: one among many other European literatures.
On the other hand, regarding the intellectual field, debates about the possi-bilities of this European literature have been limited by an almost always impor-tant, and sometimes urgent, political contingency, but one that ought not be thought of as inevitable: the fact that it is located within a state whose national project coincides with Spanish language and literature produces the effect of a restricted intellectual field. This is because there is no more urgent intellectual debate during the twentieth century than that which deals with the question of Catalan and Spanish nationality. And the Spanish national question plays a very clear role of de-Europeanizing the intellectual field, if only until the irrup-tion of Ortega’s thought – this despite the fact that Ortega’s thought contains many traps, some of which took form during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and, most of all, that of Franco. Xammar, Gaziel, Pla himself, also directly attend debates of European dimensions. Their function, however, is that of the chronicler, not of direct participants in or driving forces behind the debates (which Eugeni d’Ors actually came to be), although in their chronicles one might perceive a kind of intervention in the international debates through the literary field itself, which once again refers them to Europe. This lack of coinci-dence between national and literary identities, literary and intellectual fields, political fields and fields of power, requires an effort to think about the position of Catalan literature, and of the literatures in Catalonia, in an independent way. This independence would be determined by the necessity to conceive of the relationships of Catalan literature with the other European literatures, and with itself through these literatures, without considering state determinism as a central element of the debate. We must construct a theoretical frame that allows us to think about Catalan literature before and after Catalan independ-ence – not from partisan or divisive positions regarding this independence, but at the margin of the overdetermination that the political debate exercises over the relationships between literatures in Catalonia. And to clarify this debate we must think that, if Catalonia some day becomes independent of Spain, the same writers in Catalonia would continue writing in the same languages, and their readers in both languages would form then at least a dual field, with one slope in Catalan and another in Castilian, that would no longer automatically form part of the Spanish literary field. This dual field would suddenly have an important part of its canonical-historical legacy outside of its territory. We must rethink as well, for analogous reasons, the situations in which the writers in Catalan of Valencia and of the Balearic Islands, territories that we must assume would remain inside the Spanish state, would find themselves. In the same way, some
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 66 20/11/2012 15:10
Interliterariness and the Literary Field 67
of the most important current Spanish writers would be left, in all respects, outside of Spanish territory. Catalonia has always adopted the idea of a border as a metaphor that suddenly will become performative, and we will have to get used to its realization, in the frame of a future Europe that in many, but not all, respects, will have no internal borders. Culture will be, without a doubt, one of these aspects that, independently of the achievement of a shared idea of European culture (beyond medieval stereotypes), will continue to be more closely tied to diversity than to unity.
There are already enough elements to cause us to think that Catalan writers who write in Castilian do not exactly form part of the Spanish literary field. Here the debate tends to situate them without nuances – sometimes based on a closed inventory of writers with a very specific position in the field, and sometimes as if they represented the totality of the writers who employ Castilian as a literary language. Following the suggestions of José Lambert, we must remember the lack of coincidence between literary maps, linguistic maps, and political maps. This neither makes political maps disappear in the name of literature nor excludes the literary maps from the possibility of their intrinsic politicization. Because of this, his proposal seems extremely pertinent:
I do not claim that political, linguistic, or other principles are unimportant; all I claim is that they are insufficient. […] This is why I would like to suggest that we speak about “literature in France,” “literature in Germany,” or “literature in Italy,” instead of “German literature,” “French literature,” “Italian literature,” and so on. This is a way to indicate that the relationship between literature and socio-political structures is not a self-evident matter but needs to be investigated. (“In Quest” 72)
That is to say that, if we must imagine an independent Catalonia, we must also imagine independence for the various fields: their autonomies and heterono-mies, their complicated modulation in relation to the international literary field. This would also include the Spanish dimension, suddenly perceived as international even by Catalan authors writing in Castilian, some of whom will find it difficult to grasp that Spanish literature is no longer the domain they belong to. For some time this Spanish dimension would remain in a certain position of asymmetry within internationality because of linguistic, historical, and intellectual reasons that go beyond the idea of the state. In the world there are many literatures written in Spanish, and literature written in this language in Catalonia would be just one among many. There is nothing strange in this: it is also the case with writers in the literatures of Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and so on, who have no doubts about the fact that they are not Spanish. In Catalonia, someone who writes in Castilian would maintain with Spanish literature and the rest of the literatures in the Spanish language a different relation from that he or she maintains with the literatures in other European languages, at
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 67 20/11/2012 15:10
Institutionalizing Iberian Studies68
least for a while. On the other hand, with regard to the controversial relation-ship between politics and literature, Catalonia is no way an exceptional case in Europe. What is extraordinary, and more interesting, is that, as José Lambert points out, “it is difficult to imagine how a given nation could give place to various equally complete literary systems” (“Aproximaciones” 64). In the Catalan case we must not rely on the imagination but on rigorous verification, which would only confirm what we sense at first glance: in Catalonia there are, and have been for a long time (although not always, only from the twentieth century onwards), two completely different literary systems.
Now that we have situated the possibilities of our literary field in this way, we can look to Europe for similar models, similar problematics. Pierre Bourdieu wondered some time ago: “Does Belgian literature exist?” (“Existe-t-il une litté-rature belge?”) It is evident that the lack of terminological coincidence between the two literary traditions – Walloon-French, Flemish-Dutch – and the name of the state – Belgium – is both an advantage and a disadvantage when it comes to his analysis, which focuses on the case of Belgian literature in French. For this analysis he establishes the (almost) non-existence of an autonomous (he will say “independent”) literary field, which either leads to a provincialization of those writers who happen to identify with French literature, or a denial on the national market that they are tied to Belgian identity and its institutions. The form of existence of the Walloon writers would be determined, then, through heteronomy, because of their position in the French literary field, where we find the principal instances of establishment and institutionalization. The principal Belgian writers in French would also be the first to wash their hands of the possible creation of this kind of Belgian support. After all, they do not need the writers in Walloon, and in any case this would merely highlight a condition that, precisely as a result of achieving the recognition of Paris, it is not conven-ient for them to remember: that of being a peripheral part of the field, in which any element of local sanction will produce conceptual regionalization and nonliterary subordination. In other words, being Belgian, with regard to literary recognition in Paris, continues to be an insignificant anecdote. Furthermore, neither those who conceive of French literature as an accumulation of symbolic capital in Paris, nor those who want, legitimately, their literary ambition to become an important element of the symbolic capital of their literary language, care much if they forget that these writers are Belgian. But this situation occurs only in a narrow fringe of the literary field, and it does not cancel out nor does it clear up what to do about the rest of the positions and instances. Even taking up the argument of Maurice Lemire at the foundational moment of the Québécois literary field, the asymmetries of literary Francophonia determine an effort to shake off French domination, even as it achieved independence as a field. This independence would come, however, at the price of submitting the literary field
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 68 20/11/2012 15:10
Interliterariness and the Literary Field 69
to a loss of autonomy with regard to political, moral, and religious powers. This happens in such a way that, in general, one can differentiate, as does Paul Aron, between “independent field” – the field of the periphery with respect to the center – and autonomy/heteronomy of the field. In the Belgian case the field would undergo a constant political and cultural interpenetration that would allow it to achieve independence while at the same time reducing its autonomy. The perspectives of Bourdieu and Aron are just as contradictory as they are complementary. They do not cancel each other reciprocally if we consider that a field extends as far as its effects. It has been said occasionally that Catalan litera-ture constitutes a kind of state that Catalonia does not have. The synecdoche (or metonymy) is interesting, but it does not compensate for anything, because it makes Catalan literature retreat to positions of a lack of autonomy to which reality does not correspond.
In this sense, there is a Catalan literary field that does not entirely coincide with the Catalan intellectual field; but the latter does not maintain the same pattern of relationships with Europe as the former. Instead, it is in relation with the Spanish intellectual field – and the Spanish fields of power and politics – that it participates most actively, precisely as a function of its lack of relative autonomy. It is not a matter of heteronomy of the Catalan literary field with regard to the Spanish field of power or the literary field. It has to do with factors that necessarily intersect with the relative autonomy of the Catalan intellectual and literary fields as they relate to the field of power in Catalonia, especially from the cultural model of Noucentisme. But we must remember that this is not the only model developed by contemporary Catalonia. On the other hand, in contrast with the Belgian or Québécois fields, Catalan literature is not disturbed by a feeling of inadequacy or subsidiarity regarding the center, since it is not part of the periphery.
In any case, only Castilian literature in Catalonia could pose an analysis along this line. Although it might seem like it, the position of Castilian writers in an independent Catalonia would have little to do with Bourdieu’s analysis regarding Belgium, which would more likely correspond to the actual position of Catalan writers in France or to the position in which Valencian and Balearic writers would be if Catalonia achieves independence without them. Certainly, to writers in Castilian the Catalan market would not suffice, nor would the agencies that consecrate or institutionalize the Castilian-language literary field in Catalonia. This, however, is already the current situation – in terms of the market, but most of all with respect to America. The similarities with Bourdieu’s case are in relation to the agencies of consecration, but there also we find notable differences. The American clue also offers some possibilities for reflection about the agencies of consecration in the international literary field through Catalonia. Catalan publishing houses in Spanish constitute a constella-
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 69 20/11/2012 15:10
Institutionalizing Iberian Studies70
tion of possibilities for international establishment. Even in the 1960s Barcelona was the publishing capital in this language (Castilian), and that will undoubt-edly continue. Some of the most important writers of current Spanish litera-ture have never published a book outside of Catalonia. The boom (whatever that was) was a Barcelonan invention; and the new impulse behind the literary careers of some of the American authors of the 1980s and 1990s (Ricardo Piglia, Alan Pauls) has come at the hands of publishers like Anagrama. All this has increasingly produced a transformation of the Spanish literary field which at times, due to a startling confusion of terms, presents the local consequences of the impact of authors like Piglia (or, before, Cortázar and Borges) as general innovations, and hopes to present them as such even in Argentina – where today nobody with true literary ambition would think of redoing “El Hacedor.” Is it possible to clarify the conditions in which these fields are developed, or this dual field? To begin to answer this question we must start with the conditions in which, in fact, they are already being developed.
The fundamental theoretical and methodological axis of this possible clarifi-cation begins with a contribution by the so-called Bratislava School (a different and very concrete context), led by Dionýz Durišin. He proposed, in the latter third of the twentieth century, a new category for organizing the relationships between literatures: that of interliterary communities. These would be the resultant communities of what the Slovakian comparatist calls processes of interliterariness, and would lead to a new conception of world literature. These unities would be the (standard type of) interliterary communities, recogniz-able through a certain geopolitical, geo-historical, and geo-literary cohesion of a conglomerate of national literatures that cannot be considered in isola-tion. The interliterary communities would be formally defined by geographical, ethnic, linguistic, politico-administrative, ideological, and confessional factors. We must stress that, for Durišin, the ethnic and linguistic factors, which in other conceptions of the relationships between literatures would occupy the center, are not so decisive for the constitution of interliterary communities as are geographical, sociopolitical and administrative factors (Theory of Literary Comparatistics 31–36). Catalan literature would form part of what Durišin calls a specific interliterary community. A specific interliterary community is defined in the same way as an interliterary community, but it would count on different forms of coexistence for an interaction that would evolve in a more intense and direct manner.
The relationship between Catalan literature and other European literatures is problematic within a state framework, as it sometimes dispenses with, but at other times is conditioned by, this framework, which is no longer limited to an administrative contingency once the very possibility of changing this contin-gency modifies, in political terms, the conditions in which it is set. We must
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 70 20/11/2012 15:10
Interliterariness and the Literary Field 71
remember that inside of interliterary communities relationships may also be established through conflict (Cabo, Casas, Martí); that interliterary communi-ties in conflict are a special kind of specific interliterary community, defined by insufficiency (through failure or through inviability) of political-administrative cohesion, identity tensions, and the different situation in relation to historical time of each of the entities that form it. It is evident that the conflict between national projects is a distinctive trait of the relationships between some Iberian cultures.
But unlike other specific interliterary communities, the geographical super-position of literary traditions in different languages is a fact, and thus must unavoidably mark interliterary processes, not just through terrible anecdotes but also through categories that of themselves are full of constructive meaning. Because of this (among other less important reasons), we should also define another category derived from the interliterary community of Durišin, which Catalonia allows us to see clearly: what we could call a double interliterary commu-nity. In a territory like Catalonia, literature in its own language will maintain – precisely in the terms in which an interliterary community is defined – some relationships with Castilian literature that cannot be posed in terms of supra-nationality, but as constituting a unique public space in which the Catalan and Castilian literary fields would determine some specific connections between them, and (in the same way or other) with the rest of the literatures. These connections will have important transcendence in the intellectual field. We must wonder how the connection is made, from any of the defined positions, with the rest of the literatures, especially the European ones. In such a complex context, this relationship must be significantly different from the way it is produced in homogeneous and monolingual contexts.
All together this determines some relationships that are intrinsically diffi-cult but that mark sensible differences through which the Spanish literary field comes into being. This also plays a role in independence. On the other hand, we ought also to consider an especially interesting notion that, in the case of the specific interliterary communities, occurs habitually: the phenomena of bi-literacy or multiliteracy, and bi-nationality or multinationality, evidently connected to bilingualism. These notions would be applied to the writers and works, but also to the readers and critics who pertain to two or more literary systems throughout their literary trajectory, under some form of migration. This condition – unstable in the life of an individual, and which could be delib-erate, learned, natural or contingent, symmetric or asymmetric, among many other possibilities – may be motivated by any aspect of these multiple constitu-tive factors of the interliterary communities, and determines for the individual and his or her work an intersectional position and a diversity of functions in each situation. Therefore, these figures, especially regarding writers, are highly
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 71 20/11/2012 15:10
Institutionalizing Iberian Studies72
transcendent in the constitution of the interliterary community (Durišin, Communautés interlittéraires specifiques 51–53) and would be especially so in a double interliterary community. It would, however, constitute an error of focus to define an interliterary community only as a function of these figures, or to situate in the critical center these works or authors that foment or make possible a relationship between both literatures or represent hybridism. To act in this manner (something that happens frequently) in the name of dialog (in some academic and journalistic sectors) would imply a confusion because it limits in sociopolitical terms the possibilities of writers in one or the other language by obligating them to be read only through a political lens. Further-more, Catalan literature maintains, within the double interliterary commu-nity, diverse relationships with Castilian-language literature in Catalonia, the work of citizens of multiple national definitions that go beyond the peninsula. To these positions we must still add the literature written (in Catalan or in Castilian) in Catalonia, by people who have as their first language some other European language or, as happens with ever more frequency, a non-European one. And this is not the end of the gamut of positions that also occur in the rest of Europe.
With regard to the way in which these constitutive relationships of the literary voice (nuanced by the writer’s intellectual position) are established, the situation of the contemporary Catalan writer – be it in Catalan or Castilian – is closer to what Jorge Luis Borges proposes in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” (“El escritor argentino y la tradición”), an important talk given on December 19, 1951 in the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores, published in 1953 in the journal of that same institution, and later incorporated in the second edition of Discusión. This essay defines Argentine literature based on the triple experience of the crisis of European spirit in the interwar period, of the redefinition of the American position in the unavoidable restructuring of Western culture after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and, most of all, of the Second World War. The position of Catalan literature and the position of Argen-tine literature characterized by Borges share, first of all, characteristics such as a Europeanism based on a profound consciousness of historicity itself, despite the interruptions and discontinuities; a Europeanism – or, rather, Western dimension – which in both the Argentine and Catalan contexts has a touchstone in nationalism. In the middle of the rise of Peronism, Borges’s concern about the exigencies of compromise with the nation ends up dismantling the gaucho traits as essentially characteristic of the Argentine tradition. On the one hand it is a literary genre as artificial as any other, and on the other hand the insist-ence on local color is nothing but a recourse copied from European national cultural processes. This recourse was used at the price of forgetting the Scandi-navian, Scottish, and Greek feats in Shakespeare and Racine, which are not just
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 72 20/11/2012 15:10
Interliterariness and the Literary Field 73
thematic: “as if we Argentines could only speak of orillas and estancias and not of the universal” (“The Argentine Writer” 176). The nationalist insistence on these traits said very little about Argentine versatility, and even less of literary versa-tility, which Borges compared with two emblematic cases from cultural Europe:
I recall here an essay of Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist, on the pre-eminence of Jews in western culture. He asks if this pre-eminence allows us to conjecture about an innate superiority of the Jews, and answers in the negative; he says that they are outstanding in Western culture because they act within that culture and, at the same time, do not feel tied to it by any special devotion. “For that reason,” he says, “a Jew will always find it easier than a non-Jew to make innovations in Western culture”; and we can say the same of the Irish in English culture. […] I believe that we Argentines, we South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation; we can handle all European themes, handle them without superstitions, with an irreverence that can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences. (“The Argentine Writer” 178)
Similarly, in the Catalan case, the matter of national expression as an identifying trait in literature continues to be an exception. To think that Catalan litera-ture is sustained by something similar to local color is an error of apprecia-tion resulting from the aforementioned asymmetries, the persistent political debate, mediocrity, or bad faith. Baroja is right in affirming that “[t]here is drama in Catalan that seems written in Norwegian; verses that seem produced on the boulevard de Montmartre. […] There is a bit of everything: Swiss, Norwe-gian, Danish, and even Tartar. What is not seen is anything particularly Catalan; at least, nothing high, nothing strong, nothing worthy of the country” (“Divaga-ciones” 526). Perhaps because of this it had been some time since Baroja himself had established an association of ideas capable of surprising only relatively.
The general characters of the Jewish intelligentsia are everywhere the same: capability, internationalist tendency, a hate of war and of all violence, and a love of luxury. The vulgar Catalan does not have the migratory tendency of the Jew; […] I do not know if these Catalan writers and artists [Fortuny, Casas, Rusiñol, among others] most of whom are little friends of Spain, are Semites or not, but they look like it. (“El problema catalán” 1)
Here we must point out that Baroja does not seem exceptional in his context, and he functions as the negative of Borges’s positive affirmation of what is in fact one and the same image of the interliterary constitution of literary tradi-tions. Any tradition – the Argentine or the Catalan – would thus be only two identical examples in literary terms; they would be different in political ones.
It is in the propositional part of Borges’s text that we find the most remark-able similarities between the position of the Argentine writers and that of the Catalan writers. Borges wonders: “What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer this question easily and that there is no problem here. I believe that
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 73 20/11/2012 15:10
Institutionalizing Iberian Studies74
our tradition is all of Western culture, and I also believe that we have a right to this tradition, greater than (mayor) that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have” (“The Argentine Writer” 177–78). The after-effect of porteño arrogance is only an appearance. The word “greater” (mayor) here does not imply superiority – nor does it in the reflection about the European Jews borrowed from Veblen – but a full understanding of the meaning of cosmo-politanism as a weakness: a new force that the great literatures do not have, cannot have, when it comes to recognizing their connections and their position in Western literature. Unlike French or English letters, Argentine and Catalan literature do not risk any position of pre-eminence in literary internationality. Because of this they can talk about the Western tradition as “our tradition.” They gain this greater right because of the fact that they are lesser – not because of their smallness (non-existent, in reality), but because of the interstitial and intersectional nature of their minor position. From this perspective it is possible to conceive of the overcoming of the false dichotomy major/minor, an idea that is impossible in a literary field such as the French – even now, when current French literature has been significantly reduced (in the conventional sense of the term) and yet does not see itself as minor. The French literary field continues to resist the rethinking of cosmopolitanism – or the possibility that it signifi-cantly lacks talent. Moreover, politicization is reactive, not constitutive, in the Borgesian argument, which also dissolves whatever was collective in the term “tradition” without de-territorializing it, without proposing another reading of the maps of Western tradition.
Catalan literature, along with being a Europeanist literature, is a European literature. It comes directly out of this condition and of the consciousness of this condition. But it also depends on an advantage that is impossible in the case of Argentina: “It is said that there is a tradition to which we Argentine writers must adhere, and that that tradition is Spanish literature. This second recommenda-tion is of course somewhat less limited than the first, but it also tends to restrict us” (“The Argentine Writer” 176). The linguistic difference of Catalan literature saves it from this enclosure – and from the possible enclosure insinuated by Deleuze and Guattari in their ascription of Kafka to minor literatures. But not even when they write in Castilian do the Catalan writers form part of Spanish literature. The inclusion of Catalan writers in the histories of Spanish literature is the symmetrically opposite effect of one and the same phenomenon. It is the continuation of the tradition based on the erasure of the contiguity of the tradi-tions (and, sometimes, on the available translations, not on direct reading). It may also be the evidence, hardly pondered, of the condition of bilingual work, and the political dimension of the trajectories of concrete authors. Precisely because of this, the non-Spanish concept of Argentine and Catalan literature does not pass through a political face-off. It may be certain that what Borges
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 74 20/11/2012 15:10
Interliterariness and the Literary Field 75
says unifies them: “Argentine history can be unmistakably defined as a desire to become separate from Spain, as a voluntary withdrawal from Spain” (“The Argentine Writer” 176); but this objection is not so relevant when compared to the other that the Argentine offers:
Among us the enjoyment of Spanish literature – an enjoyment which I person-ally happen to share – is usually an acquired taste; many times I have loaned French and English works to persons without special literary preparations, and these books have been enjoyed immediately, with no effort. However, when I have proposed to my friends the reading of Spanish works, I have evidenced that it was more difficult for them to find pleasure in these books without special appren-ticeship; for that reason, I believe the fact that certain illustrious Argentines write like Spaniards is less the testimony of an inherited capacity than it is a proof of Argentine versatility. (“The Argentine Writer” 176–77)
We must note that Borges does not clarify in which language he gives the French or English books to his friends to read, but it is quite logical that he is referring to translations into Castilian, with which the Argentina of that time was very well supplied, much better so than Spain. The tradition of Western literary translation into Castilian by Argentine publishers created, in the first half of the twentieth century, the perfect conditions for this affirmation to take form. On this point, the role of the Republican exiles (some of them Catalans) as editors and translators was, in a second phase of this phenomenon, deter-mining. Spanish literature would be one more among the literatures with which a common Argentinian reader of those years could engage in the Castilian language. However, for many decades after 1939, the dependence of a Spanish reader on Argentine publishers, if he wanted to be up to speed on the principal literary and intellectual currents of the West, was nearly absolute; and, with regard to the role of translations in the constitution of their own literature, there are many similarities between the Argentine and Catalan literary fields. Spanish literature could not be the frame in which the readings of cultivated Argentines of that time came to be understood as baggage.
We must remember that, unlike the American position, the peninsular position of Catalonia forces this necessary acquired taste, the “previous special apprenticeship” (interesting nuances in the version of 1951) that allows some Argentine writers to “write like Spaniards,” to be determined by the debates of the intellectual field, on the plane of the elites. It’s not so easy in Catalonia. When it comes to talking about the literatures of Catalonia we must be very clear that the act of writing in Castilian does not convert a writer automatically into part of Spanish literature; though if this were his wish, nobody would have anything to say to the contrary. In the same way today nobody has anything to say about a Catalan writer who, when he writes in Castilian, does not feel Spanish. And we must also remember that we depend on the important baggage of literature
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 75 20/11/2012 15:10
Institutionalizing Iberian Studies76
written by Catalan citizens of Latin American origin,2 residents who have lived for decades (or who were even born) in Catalonia, and that Barcelona continues to be a literary capital of American dimensions.
If some day Catalonia becomes an independent state, the profound trans-formation of this act will be determinative for clarifying the terms in which the literatures of the Iberian peninsula will be articulated. Traditionally people talk of Spanish literature, Catalan literature, Basque literature, and Galician and Portuguese literature. Perhaps we ought to begin to consider that in the Iberian peninsula there are at least two different Castilian-language literatures, and that Spanish literature might not be the most important of the two, in the same way that in the Latin American context it no longer is. Nobody would think of saying that Argentine literature is part of Spanish literature. Nobody would think of doubting that the Argentine literature of the twentieth century has played a vital role in the evolution of Castilian-language letters – and those of many other languages – on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet Spain continues to take an assimilatory approach, arrogating Spanish American literature to itself, as part of Spanish literature, simply because it is written in Spanish. We can hardly avoid supposing that this would also occur in the Catalan case, and surely in a much more marked manner. Now, this discussion affects in a similar way both Catalan writers who also write in Castilian and those who only write in this language. There is no inescapable link with the Spanish literary tradi-tion, even when Catalan writers write in Castilian. Just as Borges claims about his own literature, any Catalan writer at the beginning of the century has, with regard to Spanish literature, “an acquired taste,” it requires effort to enjoy it – a “tasting” that is not required to appreciate French or English literature; a statement that, in the case of Catalan authors in the first half of the twentieth century, should be qualified to include mostly French and, to a lesser extent, Central and North European readings. In the second half of the last century, and the beginning of the twenty-first, a dissemination of sources occurs for a variety of reasons: generational, geopolitical, etc. But the same can be said of Catalans who write in Castilian, as they relate to Spanish literature. From the point of view of the literary field it is not even clear that those who only write in this language – and who receive a truly strange treatment from the literary and general media, especially the editorial and institutional establishments based in Madrid – belong there. In a way they are like the Belgians. It does not cease to be an anomaly – literary, not political – that Juan Marsé did not receive the Premio Cervantes until 2008, or that no other Catalan author has won it.
In this sense, it is worthwhile re-reading an article by Enrique Vila-Matas, “To Be Situated in the World” (“Situarse en el mundo), published in El País as a result of the debate about the Frankfurt Book Fair. It is very interesting that this author was the one to make this contribution to that debate, since on the
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 76 20/11/2012 15:10
Interliterariness and the Literary Field 77
one hand such an explicitly political-intellectual reflection would surprise his habitual readers, and on the other hand habitual readers of the newspaper in which it was published might be surprised by his argument, since his considera-tion of the debate is not based around the question of whether or not he should represent Catalan culture at Frankfurt, but whether he could be included, by contrast, in Spanish literature: “Converted into a Spanish writer by a work of magic or by the political art of not having been terribly invited to Frankfurt, I want to discuss certain matters relating to the language I use.” That leads him to recall critically just how little the Spanish book fair of the 1980s – the period in which he and a group of other young Spanish narrators began their literary trajectory – had achieved. Vila-Matas was then and would be for quite some time a barely known writer in Spanish letters, and his self-defined position in the literary field was as an eccentricity, in all ways. But in 2007 he writes from an absolute reconsideration of that eccentric position, situating his work in the center of a system of possible readings in the sphere that at one time was called (pejoratively) meta-literature or meta-fiction, a term now used in admiration:
The biggest problem that Spanish writers today have is their international visibility. In my particular case, I believe or imagine that I have broken this problem from the outside in, working against the superficial national canon that some critics made during the eighties. Seeing that I did not fit in this new Spanish narrative (where casticismo was cheered on and all experimentalism was rejected), I opted to write a non-national Spanish literature. (13)
Thus, Enrique Vila-Matas, one of the most important writers in the Castilian language, may be considered as an example of an aesthetic internationality opposed to the international styleme, one of the last turns of the screw of the idea of Weltliteratur. This is what gives the literature of Vila-Matas the condition of non-national Spanish literature. It does not satisfy in any way the demands of any national construction, no matter that it is written in a concrete language. It is, if we will, an avant-garde, Europeanist, internationalist gesture; but it also corresponds to the return journey of the contemporary Catalan writer:
And thus Portugal, France, Mexico and Argentina came to my work long before this was in the least accepted by my fellow citizens. I inscribed myself in a hybrid literary tradition in which the Italian-German Claudio Magris and the English-German W.G. Sebald, French eccentrics like Pérec and Roussel, Mexicans like Sergio Pitol, Argentines like Ricardo Piglia, César Aira or the ineffable Borges, Spaniards like Juan Benet and Javier Marías, would fit. (13)
The double movement that Vila-Matas suggests here is very clear. On the one hand, non-Spanish readers are those who determine, definitively, the reconsid-eration of his work in the Spanish literary field, where it ends up positioned in spite of the actual makeup of that field, with which he settles accounts not without a certain satisfaction. On the other hand, it falls into the group
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 77 20/11/2012 15:10
Institutionalizing Iberian Studies78
of readings in which those readers of diverse countries have recognized him, within an aesthetic network that is also political. Vila-Matas confirms the tradition in which he is recognized, and he gets inside of it, even though these readings were not necessarily done in an orderly manner in his own trajectory. Because if, in some cases, a deliberate filiation is visible, in others the inscrip-tion is an interpretive gesture: it is a matter of authors alongside of whom he is recognized, and is recognizable, precisely because he wants to be there, along-side them. This position of Vila-Matas may appear to be a novelty in the Spanish literary field, but is hardly so in the Catalan literary field, as an interliterary tradition forged in an individual manner, beyond the predictable or prescrib-able readings. Vila-Matas’s argument is the actualization and, insofar as it is applicable by extension to other Catalan authors, the first explicit enuncia-tion of the way in which Castilian literature in Catalonia does not have to be Spanish, even before potential independence. Now, when he affirms that these are “matters that I believe may be of interest to those who write in Catalan,” he thinks that he is suggesting something new. But in fact it is merely a new realization for him; he does not know that these are memories shared with an important cohort of his fellow citizens from a century ago: those who would read him from the tradition of his other language.
In an independent Catalonia the situation of Castilian writers will have changed profoundly, with respect to the idea of literary field and of intellectual field; and, surely, also in relation to the political field. The situation of writers in Catalan will also be very different, and independence will also begin a new era for writers in Catalan who live inside the Spanish state. Even the perspective of the Catalan writers of Roussillon cannot be expected to remain unaltered. All things considered it would be an important turn in the Iberian specific interliterary community. We must remember that, in any society, no one is completely understood, nor does anyone share everything; and that it will be very difficult (but at the same time fascinating) to conceive of a literary capital with two meridians of this dimension. The question we must ask, then, as a conclusion, is the following: will comparative literature in Catalonia be up to its own challenge?
Translated from the Catalan by Todd Mack
Notes
1 Two recent events mark the perspective of this work: on the one hand, the debate about the representation of Catalan culture at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007; on the other, the evolution of the independence movement in Catalonia in recent years, the judgment made by the Constitutional Tribunal on the Statute of Autonomy, and the demonstration of rejection by more than a million people in Barcelona on July 10, 2010.
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 78 20/11/2012 15:10
Iberian Modalities
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 1 20/11/2012 15:10
Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone CulturesSeries Editor
Lisa Shaw, University of Liverpool L. Elena Delgado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Series Editorial Board Jo Labanyi, New York University
Chris Perriam, University of Manchester Paul Julian Smith, University of Cambridge
This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary hispanic and lusophone cultures and writing. The volumes published in Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoret-ical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments that have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary hispanic and lusophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.
1 Jonathan Mayhew, The Twilight of the Avant-Garde:Contemporary Spanish Poetry 1980–2000
2 Mary S. Gossy, Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
3 Paul Julian Smith, Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television
4 David Vilaseca, Queer Events: Post-Deconstructive Subjectivities in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960s to 1990s
5 Kirsty Hooper, Writing Galicia into the World:New Cartographies, New Poetics
6 Ann Davies, Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Placein Contemporary Spanish Culture
7 Edgar Illas, Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 2 20/11/2012 15:10
Iberian ModalitiesA Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula
TThe authors’ rights have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication dataA British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-84631-832-0 cased
Typeset in Borges byKoinonia, Manchester Printed and bound bythe MPG Books Group
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 4 20/11/2012 15:10
Foreword page viiList of Contributors xi
Introduction: Iberian Modalities: The Logic of an Intercultural Field Joan Ramon Resina 1
Part I Institutionalizing Iberian Studies: A Change of Paradigm
1 Dine with the Opposition? ¡No, gracias! Hispanism versus Iberian Studies in Great Britain and Ireland Dominic Keown
2 ‘If We Build It, Will They Come?’ Iberian Studies as Field of Dreams Luisa Elena Delgado
3 Implementing Iberian Studies: Some Paradigmatic and Curricular Challenges Mario Santana
4 Interliterariness and the Literary Field: Catalan Literature and Literatures in Catalonia Antoni Martí Monterde
Part II Theorizing Iberia
5 Iberia Reborn: Portugal through the Lens of Catalan and Galician Nationalism (1850–1950) Xosé M. Núñez Seixas
6 Francisco María Tubino: Between Federalism and Iberianism Patrizio Rigobon 7 Translation and Conversion as Interconnected “Modes”. A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism in Iberian Cultures Christiane Stallaert
Contents
Resina_IberianModal_Text.indd 5 20/11/2012 15:10
Iberian Modalitiesvi
Part III Iberian Dialogs
8 Asymmetry and the Political: Paradigms for a Cultural History of the Iberian Twentieth Century Ulrich Winter
9 Sins of the Flesh: Bullfighting as a Model of Power William Viestenz
10 Jews and Jewishness in Carme Riera’s Dins el darrer blau Alfredo J. Sosa-Velasco
11 Mediterranean Exemplarities: The Case of Medieval Iberia David Nirenberg
Part IV From Sea to Iberian Sea
12 Immortality, Corruption, and the Sisè Seny: João de Barros’s Empire of Language Vincent Barletta
13 The Iberian Problem: A Confederative Model for Pessoa’s Heteronyms Humberto Brito14 Lisbon as Destination: Josep Pla’s Iberianism through his Travels to Portugal Joan Ramon Resina
