language serves as a figurative medium with which to weaken the national function of the myth of Celtic origins, turning it ultimately into a colonial form of representation that explains Galicia’s subaltern condition as both inferior and dominated:
Cuando un país tiene contra sí la fortuna y, como Galicia, se ve primero relegado á puesto secundario, casi anulado después, al paso que aumenta su desdicha, suele crecer también en apasionada intensidad, hasta rayar en el fanatismo, el amor que á sus hijos infunde … Este sentimiento de exaltado cariño hacia el suelo natal, – complicado con la enfermedad afectiva que se conoce por nostalgia, privación de aire que acaba por asfixiarnos cuando no respiramos la atmósfera de los lugares donde vive nuestro corazón – es más profundo en los pueblos de raza céltica, esa rama del nobilísimo tronco ariano, cuya condición parece tan sedentaria, como son inmóviles y permanentes sus colosales dólmenes de piedra. En los celtas de origen, el natural apego al país presenta caracteres morbosos, es un mal físico del cual se muere … (1984: 37–8)
(When a land is opposed by fortune and, like Galicia, finds itself first relegated to a secondary position and then almost annihilated, what usually happens is that, as its misfortune increases, the love that it inspires in its people also grows in passionate intensity, until it verges on fanaticism. This sentiment of impassioned love for the native land – complicated by the affective disease known as nostalgia, a deprivation of air that ends up suffocating us when we do not breathe the atmosphere of the places where our hearts live – is certainly profoundest in peoples of the Celtic race, that branch of the most noble Aryan stock, whose condition seems as sedentary as their colossal stone dolmens are motionless and permanent. In those of Celtic breed, natural fondness for the native land presents morbid characteristics: it is a physical illness from which people die …)
The above stands for one of the most enduring and politically convenient justifications of Galician national identity as a narrative of deficits and drawbacks. For this narrative to gather force, the gendered reversal of the myth of Celtic origins from worthy edifice in the process of nation building to convenient explanation for Galicia’s colonial condition was, as we have seen, of paramount importance. This narrative found immediate currency in the discourses of apolitical regionalism and Spanish centralism that competed with an emerging Galician nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, as shown by texts contemporary with those studied in this introductory chapter – Leopoldo Pedreira Taibo’s El regionalismo en Galicia (Estudio crítico) (Regionalism in Galicia (A Critical Study)) (1894) is a case in point – and others such as Augusto González Besada’s Galician literary histories (1885, 1887), which will be the subject of extended analysis in Chapter 1. The colonial trope of sentimental femininity as an outcome of Galician Celtic origins will continue to reverberate with persistent force throughout the twentieth century, being alternately contested and affirmed in the discourses of Galician political nationalism and Spanish centralism respectively. Its political function as a vehicle for colonizing discourses on Galicia was reinstated, for example, during the first decades of the twentieth century in the myriad texts about Galicia published in Spanish, including travel writings, popular fiction and non-fiction books about the region. Azorín’s book Galicia (Paisajes, gentes, carácter, costumbres, escritores …) (Galicia (Landscapes, People, Character, Customs, Writers)) – an anthology of the articles he wrote on Galician themes after 1912 – is marked by images of Galicia as a ‘región serena e inaccesible’ (a serene and inaccessible region) (1929a: 62), where a kind of poetry and music predominate that are characterized by being ‘dulcemente plañider[a]s’ (sweetly plaintive) (1930: 37) and where a population of lachrymose men (1930: 38) and loving and tender women live (1929b: 33). In 1911, Miguel de Unamuno published his travelogue Por tierras de Portugal y de España (Through the Lands of Portugal and Spain), in which his chapter on Galicia draws on analogous metaphors. Galicia is described as ‘Un paisaje femenino … incubador de morriñas y saudades’ (A feminine landscape … where nostalgia and homesickness are nurtured) (Unamuno, 1941: 163, italics in the original). After acknowledging that the Celtic ancestry of the Galician people cannot be denied (165), Unamuno elaborates on the trope of the melancholy Galician, a race that ‘rehuye luchar y se adapta y acomoda con adaptación pasiva más que activa, haciéndose al ámbito en vez de hacérselo a sí’ (avoids fighting and adapts itself with an adaptation that is more passive than active, adjusting itself to the surroundings rather than forcing the surroundings to adjust to it) and displays its characteristic ‘mansedumbre y blandura’ (meekness and softness) at all times (1941: 167). Similar images pepper Juan Ramón Jiménez’s prose on Galician themes, where negative portrayals abound of the Galician ‘hombre escaso en la opaca totalidad melancólica’ (hardly a man in the opaque melancholic totality) living in a ‘cárcel de ventanas en condenación de agua, niebla, llanto’ (a prison of windows, under a curse of rain, mist and tears) (1958: 109–10). Again, in the writings of the Galician Madrid-based essayist Victoriano García Martí throughout his career, we find this recurrent metaphoric structure. Both in his 1927 book Una punta de Europa: Ritmo y matices de la vida gallega (A European Corner: The Rhythm and Features of Galician Life) and in the reworked edition he published during the Franco dictatorship, Galicia: la esquina verde (alma, historia, paisaje) (Galicia: The Green Corner (Soul, History, Landscape)) (1954), Galicia and Galicians appear as a pathologically melancholy people, living in a state of subjugation and inhibition that is the result not of ‘causas puramente políticas’ (purely political reasons), but rather of the ‘condiciones psicológicas del alma galaica’ (psychological conditions of the Galician soul) (1954: 14), encapsulated in their ‘finura sentimental y nativa’ (native, sentimental sensitivity) (27) and their congenital inability for any form of action (24). The historical reappropriation of this discursive compound, paradoxically, lay at the core of Galician cultural resistance to Spanish fascist rule, mainly in the national rehabilitation programme devised by Ramón Piñeiro and the group of writers and intellectuals orbiting the publishing house Galaxia, established in 1950. Of prim ordial importance for the preservation of a Galician discourse of national difference, which the Galaxia intellectuals saw as the only way of salvaging Galicia’s political survival in a post-dictatorship future, was the theorization of Galicians’ differentiated psychological makeup, for which the trope of sentimentality (encapsulated in the concept of Galician saudade) served as a channel. An often unacknowledged aspect of the discourse of piñeirismo – whose legacy is still present today in the cultural institutions created under its auspices – is that one of its chief metaphors shared a history with those repeatedly utilized in centralist/colonialist depictions of Galician identity, whilst simultaneously supplying a line of continuity for these metaphors’ circulation in present-day discourses about Galicia and Galician nationalism. Yet one question remains to be asked of the historical significance and continuity of the trope of Galician ‘Celtic’ sentimentality: what has been Galician women’s role in it?
Celticism, colonial fantasy and the Galician woman question
Between 1905 and 1915 Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s unfinished study Orígenes de la novela (Origins of the Novel) was published, a work that is today considered a towering monument of nationalist Spanish literary history. Although it was written in the last years of the literary historian’s life and was truncated by his death in 1912, Orígenes de la novela represents the defining traits of Menéndez Pelayo’s intellectual project, which was firmly embedded in the Spanish nationalist, Catholic tradition of philological studies. I am bringing it to bear on my discussion of colonial discourses of the nation in and about Galicia because it bears the mark of the far-reaching tensions between centre and periphery that, as Catherine Davies has also noted, were everywhere to be seen in peninsular cultural life at the turn of the century (Davies, 2006: 172).
Menéndez Pelayo’s historical account of how Arthurian literature penetrated the Iberian Peninsula is marked by an underlying debate on national morals. The forms and themes of the Matter of Britain, by which texts such as Amadís de Gaula were inspired, are described by the historian as ‘[A]quella nueva y misteriosa literatura que de tan extraña manera
