Language, the Novelist and National Identity in Post-Franco Catalonia

Abstract

Language, the Novelist and National Identity in Post-Franco Catalonia. By Kathryn Crameri. Oxford: Legenda, 2000. 210 pages.This an ambitious attempt to draw together a of the effects of the Transition on Catalonian culture with an analysis of seven contemporaneous novels. The traditional linking of language, literature and allows Crameri to posit that the of Catalan literature during the Transition can . . . shed a direct light on matters which are relevant to Catalonia's nation-building process (4). The two halves of the book ride uneasily in harness, but the whole instructive and makes an original contribution to the bibliography. It will particularly interest Catalanists and Hispanists working in the area of cultural studies.The book's first three chapters address the issues of context, while the last four analyze selected novels by Manuel de Pedrolo (Totes les besties de carrega, D'esquerra a dreta, respectivament), Biel Mesquida (L'adolescent de sal, Puta-Mares [ahi]), Montserrat Roig (L'opera quotidiana), and Juan Marse (La muchacha de las bragas de oro, El amante bilingue).The introduction lays the groundwork for the book's complex project: to show how some Catalan novelists used and portrayed the Catalan language, to varying critical reception, in the context of a resurgent Catalanism. Acknowledging that nationalism and the connection between language and nationalism are polemical, Crameri outlines the debates only to dismiss them as irrelevant to Catalanists, whose nationalism is felt as an emotion and cannot treated dispassionately as an object of study (2). As a way around this obstacle, she opts for an emic cultural analysis, one which will summarize the Catalans' own responses and feelings (3) to the Transition, especially with respect to the symbolic content and function of the Catalan language. Novels are (too) unproblematically assumed to provide a window into those feelings.Chapters i-iii paint the historical, literary, and political background against which the novels emerged. Crameri cogently outlines the centuries-old linkage of language, literature, and as equal pillars of Catalan identity. This identification gave literature an essential role in modern Catalanism, and consecrated language as the prime marker of Catalan identity. Under Franco, the association allowed writing in Catalan to be seen as exercising a form of Catalanism (28). In the Transition, the equivalence meant that novelists writing in Catalan could not, under threat of critical repudiation, express anti-Catalanist sentiments, or ignore their responsibility to the language itself. …