Dynamiting Don Quijote: literature, colonial memory and the crisis of the national subject in the monumental poetics of the Cervantine tercentenary (Spain 1915–1921)

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effects of the commemorative cycle of the tercentenary of Don Quijote (1905–1915) in the context of the crisis of the Spanish Restoration (1917–1923). Literary figures such as Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Rafael Cansinos Assens, and Manuel Azaña understood this cycle as the symbolic response of Alphonsine culture to the “Disaster of '98.” These writers used Quixotist material in the work that they published at the very beginning of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in an attempt to narrate the Restoration's crisis of legitimacy in a Civic Republican tone. These narratives required the production of a memory critical of the colonial project, on the one hand, and the deconstruction of the commemorative regime that had restrained it, on the other. The anti-nationalist criticism of Quixotist memorialization (and, in an exemplary fashion, of the Monument to Cervantes in Madrid's Plaza de España) is tied to the iconoclastic imagination of an emancipated political community. In the works of these writers this political imagination is constructed through the analysis of the subaltern character in some early twentieth-century Spanish popular identities understood as Quixotist, that is, as subjectivities pervaded by the violent contradictions of the Brumairian poetics of National Quixotism.