Against the Damnatio Memoriae of Regional Identities: José María Sbarbi's Critique of the Homogenization of National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Abstract

In 1886, José María Sbarbi published his one-time novel Doña Lucía in which he mocked the vast inadequacies of the Real Academia's twelfth edition of the Diccionario oficial. Within the greater context of Sbarbi's critical writings on national language, this analysis examines the tension present in the novel that arises between official language controlled artificially by the nation-state and the cultural production of inherited and spontaneous language practiced by the people. The former advocated for a homogenized and exclusionary official language centered on Castilian, while the latter was a heterogeneous practice that embraced the essential diversity of the nation. Sbarbi's condemnation of a homogenized national language that excludes peripheral identities and practices takes shape as a form of cultural aphasia among the people who he portrays in his novel through the mental and physical deterioration of the eponymous character.