Of Madness and Necessity: Spanish Literature’s Modern Absence in the Anglophone Imaginary
On Miguel de Unamuno’s Essays, Paradoxes and Soliloquies and the poetry of José Zorrilla.
Para mi Madre, de Quien Todo Proviene
A recently published collection of the poetry of former Spanish national laureate José Zorrilla (b.1817)– published under the tile “Zorrilla, The Poet” by Sublunary Editions - begins with effusive praise by one Samuel Eliot. Zorrilla has reinvigorated a stagnant – by which Eliot means technically competent but soulless – tradition of Spanish poetry. Eliot’s praise is shameless:
Zorrilla’s poetry is new blood in the veins of Spanish song. The earnest spirit in which his verses are conceived, is a thousandfold more fruitful than the cold fancies of many gone before him…Strength, life and hope are in Zorrilla. Warm heart and abundant mind like his are not given to man in vain. If he be not unfaithful to himself and to his fellow men, if the promises of his prime be not feathers in air, Zorrilla’s lyre, like Orpheus’s of old, will bring back knowledge and peace and love to the land of his birth and his affections.
Zorrilla is, at least in these translations, an excellent poet. Yet reading this praise, and the words of this now unknown poet I was troubled. What troubled me so was the obscurity of Zorrilla. Fanny Hale Gardiner, whose essay ‘A Spanish Poet-Laureate’, written shortly after his death, functions as an afterword to this volume and compares Zorrilla to Alfred Tennyson. Yet Zorrilla has no purchase in our imaginations, at least not the literary imagination of the anglosphere. It is not merely a question of his verse being in a foreign tongue. Many writers, whose pen scribbles an alien syntax, are part of our anglosphere imagination. Authors from Flaubert to Zola, Mishima to Murakami are part of our literary imagination in a way that Zorrilla is not.
The problem, however, is not confined to this one Spanish poet but Spanish literature more generally. Tell me, if you can, what spans the four hundred years between Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Javier Marias’ Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. Federico Garcia Lorca, perhaps? Spanish literature is like Zorilla’s Tower of Munion, desolate and forgotten: “Thy name and history to oblivion thrown/The world forgets that there thou standst,/Munion.”
My friends do not read Spanish literature, it is not taught in secondary and tertiary syllabi (unless one takes a specialized class of course). There is no institution of Spanish philosophy like there is French philosophy or German philosophy, although of course not only are there Spanish philosophers one must assume that in Spain people think. Spanish literature is thus absent in the modern anglophone literary imaginary. At the level at which such things move through a culture and leave their traces it is defined by its absence.
This phenomenon is not new. In Luke Stegemann’s The Beautiful Obscure, his book on the strange intertwined history of Australia and Spain, he opens by describing this very phenomenon: “Propaganda is eternal, and the Anglophone denigration of Spanish cultural and intellectual achievement has a long history.” He will cite Montesquieu who lambastes the Spaniards for their laziness, and G.H.B. Ward, who in 1911 accused Spain of being: “a vast tomb, an immense mire of pestilent fumes; a rotten and ruined country, irredeemably condemned to disappear.”
At this point a clarification is necessary. The national adjective before the term ‘literature’ almost always denotes not a country but a language. Paul Celan, though Romanian and living in Paris, writes in German and is therefore a German poet and he belongs to German literature. Spanish literature then, can be taken to mean any literature written in Spanish. Thus, Jorge Louis Borges and Gabriel Maria Márquez alike belong to this pantheon. And both of those writers loom large in our anglophone imaginary. Yet Spanish literature, to denote the literature that comes from the country of Spain, does not loom large in our anglophone imaginary.
It is, also, Spanish literature specifically that is absent. Painting, for example, is dominated by Spaniards: Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, Dali, Miro. Spanish culture is ubiquitous. We know of their buildings and their history, how potent a symbol the ever under construction La Sagrada Familia is, of their food and their wars. Every lad will come to know of tapas and going to Ibiza, many of the same lads will go to their grave having never read Arturo Barea. Our relationship to Spain is, then, fundamentally illiterate.
How did this situation emerge? The anglosphere world has always been closer to French and German culture, and they form a trifecta of great powers, compared to Spain, a “ third rate power” (these words belong to William Cullen Bryant). There is an untimeliness to Spain, which remained under Franco’s fascist dictatorship until 1975, and rejected secularism for Catholicism in a world increasingly godless. Perhaps Nietzsche was translated into Spanish too late, and they never heard the good word about the death of God.
In a strange twist of fate, a way to think through this problematic might lie in another collection recently published by Sublunary Editions. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s Essays, Paradoxes and Soliloquies offers a crucial insight into this problematic, and how we should think about literatures that we come to neglect. In his essay ‘The Sepulchre of Don Quixote’ Unamuno writes:
I become more and more convinced that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, above all in our mysticism, and not in philosophical systems. It is concrete. (And is there not perhaps as much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel?) The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, Don Quijote, La Vida es Sueño, La Subida al Monte Carmelo, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life—Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht. This philosophy of ours could with difficulty formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, given up to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimistic. We shall find the hero of Spanish thought, perhaps, not in any philosopher who lived in flesh and bone, but in an entity of fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers—in Don Quixote. For there is doubtless a philosophic Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy.
Spanish philosophy, Spanish thought and Spanish life converge, but converge not in a system of thought but in a form of life. This might sound distinctly Hegelian, but Hegel is in fact that philosopher to be opposed here. Further on, Unamuno will say:
And in this philosophy is to be found the secret of what is usually said about us, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Kultur, that is to say, that we do not resign ourselves to it. No, Don Quixote resigns himself neither to the world nor to its truth, neither to science nor to logic, neither to art nor aesthetics, neither to morality nor to ethics.
Life flows from no book, and life is resistant to totality. We are an undecidable reminder, unknown to ourselves and others through both our perversions and our malleability. What does this philosophy of life mean? What does it mean to refuse to resign oneself to either the world or its truth? It means nothing less than to escape the force of the idea and to reemerge in a philosophy of decision. In his essay ‘The Helmet of Manbrino’, Unamuno recounts an episode from Don Quixote, in which Don Quixote is in possession of a barber’s bronze basin and declares that it is the lost and legendary Helmet of Manbrino. When the barber confronts him, hoping to retrieve his basin, Quixote insists that it is, in fact, the helmet of legend. The helmet is supposed to be golden and its existence dubious. The basin is bronze and clearly existent. A fight breaks out over the status of this object. For Unamuno the significance of this event is as follows:
It is courage, it is the barefaced courage that is ready to affirm a thing aloud and before all the world and to defend the affirmation of it to the death, it is courage that creates all truths. Things are so much truer the more they are believed, and it is not intelligence but will that imposes them upon the world.
At the time Unamuno was writing his essays in Spain, there was a theory of literature emerging on the other side of Europe, in which necessity and iron laws loomed large and intelligence superseded willpower. In understanding what is worthwhile in Unamuno’s worldview, in his Spanish philosophy and his Quixoticism, it is worthwhile recount the early literary theory of George Lukacs.
In his Theory of the Novel (1916) Lukacs seeks to show that the epic, as a form of literature which dominated ancient Greek life, is lost to us. Ancient Greek life existed in a totality in which such tales were intelligible, and that totality is gone. We moderns live in a condition of ‘transcendental homelessness’. It is the novel that explains such a form of life, and through the novel that we may begin to get outside of this problematic. Thus, for Lukacs, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy offer some promise of redemption. Eugene Lunn, in his Marxism and Modernism offers a powerful summary here:
In The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs, now under the influence of Hegel, referred specifically to the “concrete totality” of the ancient Greek community, in which individual physiognomy and organic whole mutually determine one another, a “totality” which is expressible through the narration of events. Finally, in the same work, he discussed the humanistic tradition of the Bildungsroman (beginning with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) as a problematic but partially successful attempt, under bourgeois conditions, to represent personal interiority and our social reality as reconcilable through the intervention of active men. The given world is not present as organic; this was possible only in the older epics. Individuals are still “transcendentally homeless.” But “the social world is partially open to penetration by living meaning”.
In Lukacs’ analysis, Don Quixote is a work whose importance lies in its role as a pivot point. Don Quixote mocks the chivalrous epics whose very form is failing by 1605. In doing so it becomes both a world historic novel but also one limited in its time and place. Don Quixote merely poses for us the problem of the closing off of the epic. This is its grandeur, what makes it great, but it relegates the book to the status of a historical curiosity. As Lukacs writes: “And Cervantes, the faithful Christian and naively loyal patriot, creatively exposed the deepest essence of this demonic problematic: the purest heroism is bound to become grotesque, the strongest faith is bound to become madness, when the ways leading to the transcendental home have become impassable.”
This form of argumentation is common to the early Lukacs. Certain works operate and work because of their relationship to a specific moment of history and totality. Here, again, is Lunn on Lukacs’ valorization of Balzac: “Balzac could compose his realist narrative, in touch with the living processes of history despite his ideological biases, because of both the objective possibilities of his situation and the fact he actively participated in the life of his age and was able to feel palpably (and not abstractly) its social forces as they crisscrossed within his life.”
This approach to literature is Hegelian and has the appeal of necessity. There is a historical logic at work that makes certain works of art relevant and critical. The positioning of an object both historically and within a social totality is crucial, and it is the work of the critic to discover this positioning and reveal why certain works help us understand our age and why others fall short or fail. And the failure is always a question of untimeliness – too soon to complete the project (so Lukacs will say of Schiller and at times Goethe) or too late (so he says of Don Quixote).
This is a critical model of the history of literature. It allows for shifting taste, it however also allows the critic to always inveigh against shifting tastes – as Lukacs was to later do in his broadsides against expressionism.
Unamuno disagrees. And in doing so he offers us another way to think about literature. Unamuno does not think Don Quixote is an ironic novel. Nor does he think it is a novel relegated to its time. He writes: “Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. There is only one way of hitting the nail on the head and that is by hammering on the shoe a hundred times. And there is only one way of achieving a real triumph and that is by facing ridicule with serenity.” Don Quixote’s madness is not parody but philosophy. Lukacs’ historical approach sees Cervantes as a pivot point – one worthy of praise but still only valuable insofar as it is the first novel to broach the problems that concern Lukacs in The Theory of the Novel – but not a work from which meaning springs eternal. Yet this historical approach serves only to denigrate literature and life.
Such a worldview also might feed into a rational for Spain’s demise on the stage of world literature. Mired in a rapidly decaying Catholicism and already too late Quixotism, it could never be of the spirit of its age, at least not globally. Spanish literature cannot raise itself to the status of the world historic, and only occasionally do writers of renown break through. But if courage is truth, then perhaps the fate of Spanish literature today is not determined by the laws of world history. The decision to republish Unamuno and Zorrilla by Sublunary Editions is act that could remake the world. And to argue about Spanish culture as if it were the byproduct of world historic laws and not contingency, is to decide that the bronze basin could only ever be a bronze basin and never the Helmet of Manbrino.