Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture (review)

Abstract

216 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press By Michael Ugarte In the preface to his Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture, Michael Ugarte makes it clear he has written a book of literary criticism he wants readers to find intellectually engaging as well as pleasing. Ugarte has made a theoretically provocative, gracefully argued contribution to the study of urban Spanish literature from around the last decade of the nineteenth century to the first three decades or so of the twentieth. His treatment of Madrid literature (chiefly prose, with the exception of Valle-Inclán's esperpentos) introduces a fresh, fruitful way for Hispanists to approach Spanish literarure written at the dawn of Spain's modernity. It is also accessible to those in other fields conducting comparative studies. Across rhe disciplines, many intellectuals whose theories of culture have been closely tied to the historical have underestimated the importance of space, place and geography in artistic representation of all kinds. Ugarte, inspired in part by Walter Benjamins reading of nineteenth-century Paris, seeks to "lay bare the concrereness of culture, its materiality both in relation ro the commodity system and to the social practices of which it is both the producr and the producer " (15). The relarionship between Spanish urban history and rhe history of the Spanish nation-state is always a given in Ugarte's study. He draws (not uncritically) on other socially minded scholars such as RaymondWilliams, Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson, and fellow Hispanist Edward Baker in his interrogation of the role of history, gender, politics and economic relations in Spanish literary production at the turn of the century. His position is that history is an undeniable and concrete teality but at the same time he is sensitive to, as he states in his introduction, "the multifaceted, subjective, and quirky constructions of history conveyed through language. Indeed quirkiness (or marginality, and that which does not fit into the accepted categories) is precisely what leads me to read women's assimilations and representations of cities in conjunction or againsr those of the more-established male writers. In short, what follows is a doubleedged (and I hope problematic) attempt to offer a panoramic view of Madrid representation around 1900 and to create a tension in that very panoramic view by considering the glimpses, the writing rhar does not mesh easily with previously defined categories" (6-7). For Ugarte, therefore, the production of meaning is a social act within specific times and spaces whose understanding is impossible without historical considerations. Ugarte carefully selects authors who recreate city space as a replica not only of a locale but of an entire aesthetic project. The first chapter, "Reading Madrid's History," is a brief introduction to urban Madrid as represented by authors such as Larra, Mesonero Romanos, Galdós and Pardo Bazán. The second , "Urban Sociology and Narrative" provides close readings of parts of Baroja's Book Reviews 217 La lucha por la vida trilogy and El árbol de la ciencia, focusing on the authot's socioscientific worldview and his seemingly uncritical belief in reality and empirically verifiable truth. A woman reads and recreates Madrid in Chapter 3. Carmen de Burgos, writing at atound the same time as Virginia Woolf, is not entitely unlike her female characters whom at some point take charge of their urban environment. In Chapter 4 "the Bohemian frivolity of life in the street was both Ramon's trademark and his aspiration," (105) says Ugarte of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, whose works of supposed nonfiction (the greguerÃ-as) simultaneously contain a clash berween the mundane object of description and its seemingly transcendent value. Chapter 5 focuses primarily on "Madrid as esperpento," or the relarionship between an essentially urban Bohemia and modernism in selected works of Ramón MarÃ-a delValle-Inclán. "Madrid's Grand Country Bumpkin : AzorÃ-n" is the last chapter which deals wirh José MartÃ-nez Ruiz's recapturing of the Madrid of his more politically radical youth with specific attention to the dichotomy between country and city. This last chapter skillfully...