a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.
Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Vicent, Manuel. Tranvía a la Malvarrosa. Barcelona: Suma de Letras, 2004.
1 In a specifically Spanish context, Ulrich Winter’s use of the term “arte del olvido” (the art of forgetting) eloquently describes certain contemporary works of art that present an all too rosy image of the past. (Winter 32).
GRECO-ROMAN CLASSICS, NATIONAL LITERATURES AND LITERARY HISTORY IN THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE MODEL OF JUAN ANDRÉS
Tomás González Ahola, University of Santiago de Compostela
In this article I consider the relationship between the literatures of Graeco-Roman Antiquity on the one hand, and the various national literatures on the other, in the historiographical discourse of the eighteenth century Jesuit Juan Andrés Morell. The main objective is to show how, in a period that was dominated by controversy about the exemplary role of the classics and the tension between the Enlightenment and the Romantic model of literary history, Andrés was able to create a new, global, historiographical model that valued the individual contribution of each specific nation. In this model, the Greek and Roman literatures were analysed separately and compared both with one another and with the other literatures known in Andrés’ day. But, unlike the Enlightenment and Romantic historiographers, Andrés did not see the classical literatures as immovable models of all the literary virtues, nor as reflections of the “national specificity” of the Greeks and Romans.
First, it is important to note that until very recently scant attention was paid in comparative studies to the literatures of antiquity, not only those of the Greeks and Romans, but also the Indian, Persian, Sumerian, Hittite and others. Until recently, moreover, any history of the Greek or Roman literatures was structured in much the same way as the histories of any of the other national literatures. Today, this model has been questioned in an effort to expand the new paradigms of comparative literature and literary theory to fields that have traditionally been the domain of disciplines such as textual critique, classical philology or historical linguistics. The first problem that confronts the researcher in this area is that the literatures of antiquity possess a series of very concrete characteristics that are absent from the national literatures. In order to create a new epistemological model that accords with contemporary requirements, a thorough analysis of these characteristics is needed. It is not the aim of this article to undertake an exhaustive analysis of this kind, but I believe that we may have interesting reflections to offer on the subject to be treated here, and that these are intimately related to the links between the classical and the national around the last decades of the eighteenth century, when Juan Andrés was developing his ideas on comparative literature.
Over the centuries, the presentation of classical literature in the histories of European literature has undergone a number of changes. Among these has been a profound change in the notion of “the exemplary”. Focussing on the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, we see how, from a first model of Enlightenment history that inherited certain conventions from the normative paradigm, a new, very different, model emerged: the model of “National History”, which sprang from new currents of thought such as Herder’s philosophical ideas and Scottish primitivism. These ideas, along with the development of the new concept of the “nation”, enlarged the distance between “ancient literature” and “national literature.” Prior to this, especially in the Romance-language countries such as Spain and Italy, there was no consciousness of a barrier between these two worlds. The separation of “the ancient” from “the national”, which first occurred in the Germanic-speaking countries, soon spread throughout Europe, eventually affecting the entire field of classical philology – or rather, giving birth to what we today call “classical philology”.
It seems apposite to mention F.A. Wolf at this point. Known especially for his Prolegomena ad Homerum, Wolf was also the first to employ concepts such as “the Roman nation” or “national spirit” in his account of Latin literature. Wolf, the creator of the Altertumswissenschaft or Science of Antiquity, completed the process of rupture between the “modern” and the “ancient”, and established epistemological and theoretical guidelines for tracing the histories of Latin and Greek Literatures, many of which are still applied today. Thus with the ancient world marked off as an enclosed and separate reality, the European literatures ceased to be seen as a continuation of the classical; instead, the Middle Ages was taken as the starting point for the new literary histories. In the course of just a few decades, the perception of continuity disappeared and gave way to the concept of “national literatures”: both the modern “European” ones that emerged from the limbo of the High Middle Ages, and the “ancient”, such as the Greek and Latin literatures, which scholars began to analyse through the philosophical prism of nationalism.
Juan Andrés’s work is little known today: not even within the history of Spanish literature has it received the recognition it deserves. Andrés was a Spanish Jesuit priest who took a profound interest in literary history. When King Charles III ordered the expulsion of the Company of Jesus in 1767, he went into exile in Italy where he developed his ideas on historiography, which were closely related to those of Friedrich Schlegel and Herder. His main works were written in Italian, but his brother translated many of them into Spanish. He thus became well known in Spain in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. Andrés’ principal work, Dell’Origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura, offers the best example of the new epistemological model for comparative history. It not merely juxtaposes the different literatures and establishes parallels between them, but transcends these juxtapositions to form a larger organic whole – one that was founded on the model of the Enlightement histories, but developed it a great deal further. As he himself wrote in the prologue to his work:
Tenemos infinitas historias literarias, unas de naciones, provincias y ciudades; otras de Ciencias y Artes particulares; todas en verdad utilísimas … pero aún no ha salido a la luz una obra filosófica que tome por objeto toda la literatura. (Andrés 16)
(We have infinite literary histories, some of nations, provinces and cities; others of particular Sciences and Arts; all of them truly are extremely helpful … but we have not yet had a philosophical work that takes as its object the whole of literature.)
Abbé Andrés was therefore working with a concept of literature as Studia Humanitatis rather than Belles Letres – a concept that he would use to encompass all mankind’s accumulated knowledge, in all the cultures of the world that were known in his day. Thus Andrés aimed to take into account not only the poetry, drama or novels of different nations but their contributions to the sciences as well. This led him, among other things, to acknowledge the importance of the Islamic world. Such acknowledgement was highly controversial at the time, and may explain why the Jesuit’s work was ignored and forgotten. Dell’Origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura is written in a profoundly comparative spirit, with every national literature and author, every element of knowledge seen as a cog that sets other cogs in motion within a great machine of history that must be understood as a whole.
As far as his conception of Greek and Latin literatures is concerned, Andrés came closer to the ideas of Herder and Romanticism, according first place to Greek rather than to Latin literature because of its originality and liveliness. Nevertheless, Andrés did not allow himself to be swept away by the idea of the Greeks’ unique genius. True to the spirit of the Enlightenment, he considered the birth of Greek literature from the point of view of progress, and in doing so broke away from the prevailing Eurocentrism
