Cervantes, the Golden Age, and the Battle for Cultural Identity in 20th-Century Spain

Ana María G. Laguna

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501374913
• eBook ISBN: 9781501374937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

Studies that connect the Spanish 17th and 20th centuries usually do so through a conservative lens, assuming that the blunt imperialism of the early modern age, endlessly glorified by Franco's dictatorship, was a constant in the Spanish imaginary. This book, by contrast, recuperates the thriving, humanistic vision of the Golden Age celebrated by Spanish progressive thinkers, writers, and artists in the decades prior to 1939 and the Francoist Regime. The hybrid, modern stance of the country in the 1920s and early 1930s would uniquely incorporate the literary and political legacies of the Spanish Renaissance into the ambitious design of a forward, democratic future. In exploring the complex understanding of the multifaceted event that is modernity, the life story and literary opus of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) acquires a new significance, given the weight of the author in the poetic and political endeavors of those Spanish left-wing reformists who believed they could shape a new Spanish society. By recovering their progressive dream, buried for almost a century, of incipient and full Spanish modernities, Ana María G. Laguna establishes a more balanced understanding of both the modern and early modern periods and casts doubt on the idea of a persistent conservatism in Golden Age literature and studies. This book ultimately serves as a vigorous defense of the canonical as well as the neglected critical traditions that promoted Cervantes's humanism in the 20th century.

1

Mining the Golden Age: The Spanish Avant-Garde and Visions of Modernity

Nothing at the beginning of the twentieth century suggested that Spain desired to use the Golden Age as an inspiration for modernity. After the loss of the last Spanish colonies overseas in 1898, old icons such as Don Quixote would be famously associated with the nostalgic laments of the Generation of ’98, which urged the country to look inward and to the far past of the sixteenth century to recover the national soul, now as lost as its empire.¹ During the early 1900s, however, the “politics of despair” associated with the Generation of ’98 would coexist with much more optimistic aspirations to move the country forward into the modernity of the new century.² This desire for progress materialized into a series of policies that by the 1930s had started to produce some encouraging results, albeit with considerable delays. From 1910 to 1930, the population grew by 10 percent, life expectancy improved from forty-one years to fifty, the proportion of the population that lived in cities increased from 15.8 percent in 1910 to 26.5 percent in 1930, and salaries (especially in urban areas) rose a staggering 29 percent.³ Not surprisingly, the improvement in the standard of living translated into a dramatic rise in the country’s literacy rate, evolving from an embarrassing 48 percent in 1900 to a more respectable 73 percent by the late 1920s, which made Spain’s once lagging cultural standards comparable to those of other developed nations.⁴ Other indicators of progress also dramatically improved, despite constant political volatility: domestic production tripled, a timid tax reform was accomplished, and the number of railways miles doubled.⁵ The country was certainly on a new path.

These advances occurred during the so-called Spanish Restoration (1874–1931), a period that saw the re-establishment of a constitutional monarchy under the Bourbon dynasty and an electoral system that deliberately alternated liberal and conservative governments, hoping to bring stability to an otherwise turbulent political scene.⁶ In reality, the differences between the liberal and conservative programs were so dramatic that both factions dedicated large portions of their time in power to reversing the policies instituted by the previous legislature.

It was therefore only a matter of time before this counterproductive political system resulted in massive domestic and international failures, such as the disastrous Spanish-American War of 1898, the long military conflict with the Moroccan Protectorate, and the inability of the government to reconcile regional disparities and combustible social discontents (exemplified by the tragic civil conflict of Barcelona in 1909).⁷ The growing unrest, deepened by military and financial pressures, precipitated a coup in 1923 by Genral Primo de Rivera, who remained in power until 1931.⁸ While Primo de Rivera’s “technocratic regenerationist” reform—aided by King Alfonso XIII—was genuinely invested in continuing and even accelerating the timid reform of the country begun by his predecessors, the nature and corruption of the regime set an uneven pace for such modernizing process, limiting it mostly to urban areas.⁹

This complex political scenario posed obvious challenges for Spain’s emerging but fragile modernity, leading several schools of thought to negate its existence altogether. Indeed, when modernity is measured by the specific benchmarks and indicators that most European powers had reached in the 1800s (national debt, gross domestic product, and so on), by the early 1900s, Spain’s battle for development could be considered already lost. However, when modernity is understood as a more dynamic endeavor, dependent on the fluid development of major interlocking dimensions—economic, political, social, and cultural—Spain’s quest for progress appears more promising and less unique, even when plagued by the extreme inconsistencies built into the development of the country.¹⁰ Thus, as the Spain of the late 1920s, struggled to make overdue technological and financial improvements, it also witnessed extraordinary developments in its cultural and social spheres. By 1931, with the birth of the Second Republic, this uneven evolution had positioned the country at a critical turning point: While its lingering structural deficiencies could very well torpedo the most carefully drafted development programs, its new demographic strength and political will could launch it to the spectacular, national success it had dreamed of.

This juncture, with its tension between historical limitations and an exciting, if hesitant, leap into the future, provides the context from which we can best understand Spain’s fixation with the past. If the explicit nexus between the 1521 Comuneros’ revolt and the 1931 Republican revolution was foundational for the progressive agenda, it was just one of the many inspirational references that progressives took from early modern Spain. Other events, artists, and authors—from Cervantes to Erasmus—would also acquire a place of honor in their outlooks and programs. The practice was not limited to left-wing thinkers; a wide array of political theorists, writers, and philosophers of every ideological inclination would turn to the 1500s for inspiration or justification for their views and aims. The influential José Ortega y Gasset is a case in point. In 1914, appearing particularly well positioned to identify the reasons for the country’s stalling on the road to modernity, the philosopher censured the errors and inconsistencies of the Restoration with multiple comparisons to the early modern period:

The Restoration period lacks nothing. There are great state men, great thinkers, great generals, great parties, great wars: Our army battles the Moors in Tetuán just as in the times of Gonzalo de Córdoba, and goes after the Northern enemy—finding death at sea—just as in the times of Phillip II; Pereda is Hurtado de Mendoza, and from Echegaray, a Calderón can emerge. But all of this occurs within the realm of nightmare; it is the appearance of a life where the only thing real is the act of imagining it. The Restoration period was, in short, a ghost act, and [Antonio] Cánovas [del Castillo] the man responsible for this phantasmagoria.¹¹

Ortega’s reluctance to assess the Restoration in and of itself, choosing instead to contrast it with the more distant realities of the 1500s and 1600s, implies an obvious respect for the Golden Age and a marked interest in keeping a safe distance from his country’s more immediate past.¹² By portraying the Restoration’s flawed statesmen, diplomats, and playwrights as nightmarish shadows of brilliant earlier figures such as Gonzalo de Córdoba (1453–1515), Hurtado de Mendoza (1535–1609), and Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), Ortega paints a somber picture of Spain’s inability in the late 1800s to meet modernity’s challenges and dreams. At the same time, he obliquely suggests that modern Spain might benefit from a dive further back into its own history, to the great figures of the Golden Age.

Exasperation with the Restoration was not the only reason thinkers such as Ortega turned their attention to the Golden Age. A new cultural force, the avant-garde entered Spain with an unforeseen strength in the early 1920s, highlighting a new association between present and past, with the Golden Age as a primary point of reference. While a return to the past may at first sight seem incompatible with vanguardist anti-traditionalist experimentation, a closer look at the movement explains its paradoxical interest in early modern models and sources.

A Golden Avant-Garde

One of the most idiosyncratic attitudes of avant-garde artists was their well-known animosity toward the “traditionalism” of art, which they rebelled against passionately. They often expressed their rebellion through a return to artistic “primitivism,” that is, to the aesthetic parameters of African and pre-Columbian cultures that were considered too “remote in space and time” to have fallen prey to the constrictive expectations of Western art and conservative criticism.¹³ The primitivism cherished by experimental artists in turn served to channel their aesthetic rejection of “European mediateness,” since all reference to the Western artistic tradition had to “be destroyed.”¹⁴ However, as avant-garde movements evolved, they started to incorporate recognizable elements or technical features of European artistic production—for example, the specific kinds of paint and brushstrokes of Renaissance masters.¹⁵ It soon became apparent that the avant-garde’s wrath was not directed toward just any kind of past, but only the recent one, marked by Romantic painters, bourgeois taste, and traditional academic norms. Thus, the avant-garde, somewhat ironically, embraced the influence of more distant inspirations, such as the Renaissance old masters.

As the avant-garde progressed, a return to the early modern past would become more intimately connected to radical and modern experimentation. As André Malraux noted, “at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the painters who wished to be the most modern, which means most committed to the future, who rummaged most furiously in the past.”¹⁶ This contorted journey forward toward the innovation of modernity echoes the assessment of Ortega y Gasset quoted above, where the return to a distant early modern reference involves not only a rejection of an immediate precedent, but also a search or longing for a better—more modern—future.

In tracing and assessing the unexpected return to the 1600s that occurred in the early 1900s, this chapter explores the avant-garde’s productive dialogue between the early and late modernities of these two centuries. This dialogue, however, had a mixed long-term effect. On the one hand, thanks in part to the multitalented group of artists, writers, and professionals born around the 1890s or early 1900s—many eventually known as, or associated with, the Generation of 1927—the vanguard would re-energize the synergetic relationship characteristic of Renaissance arts at a caliber and scale unseen since the 1500s. On the other hand, this hybrid aesthetic revolution, while productive in the arts, brought a very different outcome in other cultural and intellectual contexts, since its radicalization of sensibility and thought contributed to the increasing polarization of left and right ideologies in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The antagonistic political poles that developed inside and outside the avant-garde agreed on aesthetic principles—hybrid artistic experimentation, inspiration from the past—but differed on pretty much everything else. While liberal thinkers and experimental artists would generally view the Golden Age as a dynamic catalogue of artistic and intellectual techniques and perspectives, conservatives would focus on the doctrinal and political frameworks erected to reign in such heterogeneity. This increasingly polarized approach to the past would enhance early modern references with an additional—seldom recognized—significance for the country’s present. Thus, while in literary discussions of the connections between twentieth-century and early modern writers, scholars have almost exclusively focused on the attention paid by the Generation of ’27 to the towering poet Luis de Góngora—whose rediscovery in 1927, the tercentenary of his death, gave the group its name¹⁷—it is the attention to Cervantes that epitomizes the widening gaps, frictions, and fears of the moment. Unlike the fatigue with Góngora that soon followed his revival during that intense 1927, the evocation of Cervantes only continued to grow over the decades, if not always in positive ways. Reflecting the ideological schism of the literary and cultural environment, Cervantes would become a painful symbol of the competing ideas of Spanish modernity that emerged in these decades.

A Blended, Modern Revolution

Spain’s return to the early modern past in the 1920s and 1930s was not unique. On the preoccupation of Western avant-garde movements with early modern art forms, Wendy Steiner notes that “[u]nlike such moments in scientific history where one paradigm directly supplants another, the avant-garde model was instead superimposed upon the Renaissance norms, and carried with it not only meaning and power but the marker of newness and success.”¹⁸ Spain was clearly at the forefront of this practice; Pablo Picasso, for example, the most revolutionary painter of the Spanish avant-garde (and, arguably, of twentieth-century art) demonstrated a deep interest in Renaissance and Baroque art though his “devouring preoccupation” with Golden Age “traditions.”¹⁹ Beyond the obvious influence of the Spanish pictorial vernacular in his opus, the artist paid constant explicit homage to his Golden Age predecessors by painting forty-four renditi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Tale of Two Modernities
• 1 Mining the Golden Age: The Spanish Avant-Garde and Visions of Modernity
• 2 The Empire Strikes Back: Cervantes, Enemy of the State
• 3 A Generational Shift: Riding Away from the Empire
• 4 Anachronism as Weapon and Resistance (Quixotes Left and Right)
• 5 Post Tenebras Spero Lucem: Attempts at Counter-Colonial Modernity in Exile
• Epilogue: Humanism Suspended—The Reverberations of Silence
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint