of national identity politics, therefore avoiding the study of those historical figures who, despite being ‘os verdadeiros rectores da política galega’ (the main commanders of Galicia politics) (Veiga, 2003: 15), either hindered or instrumentalized Galicia’s nascent national aspirations. In contrast to this trend, Vallejo Pousada’s account reconsiders the complexities of these Galician ministers’ real scope of action in a context of rampant structural corruption and political nepotism, conceding that some of their actions and decisions while in government could be interpreted as of benefit to Galicia’s progress (2005: 18). Central to his more magnanimous interpretation of González Besada’s relationship with Galicia is his emphasis on the politician’s activities during the first years of the regionalist movement, his presence at most of its symbolic events and, crucially, his collaborations with the movement’s associated publications and cultural activism. In the main, he argues for a greater critical acknowledgement of the link between González Besada’s ‘aficciones literarias’ (literary inclinations) as a young man in Santiago de Compostela and his life as a politician in Madrid (75), and is critical of a historiographical tradition that has ignored this interrelation or refused to cast it under a positive light. This tradition, he adds, has been sustained by both historical and literary studies in Galicia, as the result of an implicit criterion whereby political ambivalence or dissidence with regard to pro-national positions has hindered straightforward processes of canonization. In opposition to this, Vallejo Pousada’s proposition is that Besada’s regionalist inclinations were to accompany him throughout his life as a front-line politician in Madrid and that political and literary historians in Galicia have been inclined to obliterate this fact mainly because ‘González Besada non permanece na nómina intelectual do rexionalismo militante’ (González Besada did not remain on the intellectual payroll of militant regionalism) (80).
The young Augusto González Besada was certainly present at the key moments of the nascent regionalist movement in Galicia. He contributed to periodicals such as El País Gallego (The Galician Country) or Galicia after 1885, was one of the founding members of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega (Galician Regionalist Association) in 1890 and played a part in the organization of the Xogos Florais (Floral Games) in Tui (1891), where Manuel Murguía would use Galician publicly for the first time. Recent re-evaluations of González Besada’s political biography as coherently in line with his years of ‘euforia rexionalista’ (regionalist fervour) (Vallejo Pousada, 2005: 86) have therefore turned to the Galician literary histories he wrote in 1885 and 1887, as well as to his acceptance speech on Rosalía de Castro at the Real Academia Española in 1916, as evidence that he never ceased to nurse his bonds with Galicia and with Galician regionalism fondly. Although his literary histories have attracted virtually no critical attention in Galicia beyond nominal reference, his speech at the Royal Spanish Academy has recently been translated into Galician, re-edited and presented to the Galician public as an ‘obra reabilitadora da vera effigies de Rosalia’ (a text that rehabilitates the true image of Rosalía de Castro) (Garcia Negro, 2004: 5). Besada’s speech, the first biography of Rosalía de Castro after Manuel Murguía’s chapter in Los precursores (The Precursors) (1885: 168–200), is approached in this re-edition as the work of a politician who, three years before his death and at the cusp of his political career in Madrid, looks back nostalgically at his youthful affiliation with regionalism and inscribes in the text a certain desire for redemption.1 Garcia Negro’s rebranding of this speech resorts to the image of the return to the maternal homeland, when Garcia Negro describes it as a ‘¿reparación? ou [d]unha devolución á sua terra de nacimento, como unha sorte de unión umbilical con ela, através dun símbolo superlativo’ (reparation? Or perhaps a return to his homeland, as a kind of umbilical attachment with it, expressed through a superlative symbol) (2004: 14, emphasis in the original). However, although Garcia Negro introduces the text as the politician’s heartfelt tribute to Rosalía de Castro, she still puzzles over the paradox that what she sees as a thoughtful and sensitive account of Rosalía de Castro’s significance should have sprung from a man whose sensitivity towards Galicia had been mangled by years of self-serving political activity in Madrid (2004: 11). The same paradox underlies Francisco Rodríguez’s afterword in the book, where, after a description of the text as unexpectedly appreciative of Rosalía de Castro’s ‘true image’, the critic still grapples with the glaring contradiction between Besada’s seeming reverence for Rosalía de Castro and the fact that he was ‘un dos manipuladores ao servizo dunha estratéxia ideolóxico-cultural do Estado español’ (one of the manipulators in the service of the Spanish state’s ideological/cultural strategies) (Rodríguez, 2004: 93). In a necessarily decontextualizing turn, the scholar decides that the politician must have been simply appreciative of literary talent (94).
We see, then, that intermediary cultural and political agents such as Augusto González Besada have posed a challenge for Galician cultural history and its practitioners. In a nutshell, the study of such figures has been temporarily delayed – because of their direct responsibility in forging Galicia’s ineffective exchange of progress for identity at the beginning of the twentieth century (Veiga, 2003: 35) – only to be recently promoted by cultural critics who have seen in their writing a kernel of genuine attachment towards Galicia, albeit one riddled with contradictions. A more historicizing scrutiny of such contradictions may help us disambiguate, at least tentatively, questions of differentiation and power during a formative period of Galician national discourse in the frame of Spanish state politics. Figures such as Augusto González Besada, who straddled political and cultural boundaries between Galicia and Spain throughout his career, provide us with crucial keys to the discursive understanding of Spanish–Galician power relations at the beginning of the twentieth century, beyond the question of these figures’ commitment or affiliation to one cause or the other. Thus Garcia Negro’s passing observation that González Besada moved in a constant conflict of duality between ‘Galiza/España; sentimento/práctica política; devocións/intereses; cariño/diñeiro e poder’ (Galicia/Spain, sentiment/political praxis, devotion/interests, affection/power) (2004: 17) provides a suitable perspective for this chapter’s content.
The above reference to a sentimental angle offers an insight into the controversy that I will analyse with regard to González Besada’s cultural writings. An exploration of his cultural texts, from the two histories of Galician literature he wrote in 1885 and 1887, at the time of his involvement with Galician regionalism, to his Academy address on Rosalía de Castro when he was an influential politician in the Spanish government, throws light on how different discourses of Galician identity were being used to negotiate the formation and scope of Galician national resurgence, and on how cultural texts such as literary histories were crucial in this process. Specifically, we will see how the politician’s cultural texts include repeated theorizations of Galician identity – and of its three main constituents: Galician territory, language and people – as harmonious with a definition of Galician regionalism that would consentingly delegate its aspirations to the greater good of the Spanish nation. Further, this political outline is carried across by the gender metaphors on which his texts rest, which help the author depict an image of Galician identity and culture not only as naturally gentle and innocuous, but as politically inoperative. In other words, region, language and culture are described in relation to images of women and femininity, which, with the aid of ingratiating comment and undermining rhetoric, served to deny the region’s capacity for action. In political terms, this gendered vision of a region only fit for sentimental expression served the double purpose of appearing to pander to Galician regionalist aspirations while simultaneously obstructing their material political advances. Keeping this general outline in mind, my analysis in this chapter will look at three critical questions thrown up by González Besada’s texts. First, I shall look at the matter of historical methodology as a ground on which a much-berated host of ‘local historians’ had to prove their academic worth. As we saw in the Introduction, attacks on the erudite men who were directing their efforts towards the histories of the country’s peripheral nations were becoming a frequent leitmotif in the institutional circuits of Spanish historical practice. Doing regional history was, therefore, a hazardous occupation, and one whose stakes were being raised by a gendered rhetoric of attack and ridicule, of exclusion and inclusion, in increasingly professionalized homosocial circuits. I will look at the texts of González Besada’s Galician
