Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image Edgar Illas Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image. Joan Ramon Resina. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 272. $60.00 (cloth). The aim of this book is to analyze the “urban unconscious” that has accompanied the development of modern Barcelona from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day (3). Resina concentrates on a variety of literary texts produced during this period, as he considers literature “an exceptionally efficient mode for representing the city” (5) and a productive way to access its urban unconscious. The author interprets this unconscious as an image, “the modern image of Barcelona,” (5) but here image is understood not as “something exclusively visual, but rather [as] a representational configuration in the social imaginary” (5). To explain the formation of this modern image, the book intertwines the analyses of literary texts with rich and stimulating references to architecture, tourism, language politics, economic issues, and political figures. Resina seeks to describe through this intermingling of materials the image that confers the city with its underlying “character,” its “identity” (6), or, as the title says, its “vocation of modernity.” Resina explains how this vocation emerged in the nineteenth century with the development of the city’s industry, its urban expansion, the architectural renovation that culminated in modernisme, or the formation of Catalan nationalism. The book describes many events of this “bourgeois city”: the first train of the Iberian Peninsula, the Barcelona-Mataró railroad line, inaugurated in 1848; Ildefons Cerdà’s 1859 urbanist plan for the Eixample; the emergence of a bourgeois class for whom economic progress compensated for their lack of political power, as Narcís Oller depicted in his novel La febre d’or (The Gold Rush, 1889–1892); the city’s idealized perception of itself as “the Paris of the South;” the lavish opera-house of Gran Teatre del Liceu; and, in general, the formation of a civil society apart from the central structure of the state. Resina recalls the efforts of the Catalan bourgeoisie, gathered around the party Lliga Regionalista de Catalunya and its leader Enric Prat de la Riba, to turn nationalism into a transformative tool to modernize Catalonia. One of Resina’s most insightful points is his stress on the fact that the Lliga, far from being a merely conservative party, embarked on a secularizing task that helped Catalanism disentangle itself from the Christian and rural connotations (represented, most notably, by the figure of Bishop Josep Torras i Bages). Resina also argues that the cultural movement of noucentisme, whose most prominent figure is Eugeni d’Ors, should not be simply interpreted as subservient to the class interests of a bourgeoisie challenged by class struggle. Rather, the noucentistes’ envisioning of Barcelona as an ideal city, with its civic values and order, was also an attempt to implicate everybody in the construction of collective life. The book takes an indirect path to describe the interruption of this process of modernization and Catalanism by the autocratic regimes of Primo de Rivera and Franco. That is, the [End Page 811] book proceeds by comparing how various foreign writers, most notably Jean Genet in Journal du voleur (1949) and André Pieyre de Mandiargues in La marge (1964), portrayed the city’s red-light district or Barrio Chino. While Resina describes the discesa all’inferno of these writers as affected by a kind of “viscous enticement, half-Orientalism, half-fascination with the prurient and the loathsome” (107), in the end he interprets the marginality of the red-light district in relation to the subordinate condition of the Catalan people under Francoism. Along these lines, Resina focuses on Mercè Rodoreda’s novel La Plaça del Diamant (The time of the Doves, 1962) to show how, under Francoism, many Catalans attempted to preserve in their intimate, everyday spaces the memory of a modern “urban image” and a Catalan nation that had been wiped out from the public sphere. One of the most combative and exciting parts of the book is the section on Juan Marsé’s novel El amante bilingüe (The Bilingual Lover, 1990), a novel set...