Pre-modernist Elements in the Origin of Basque and Catalonian Nationalism

Abstract

Pre-modernist Elements in the Origin of Basque and Catalonian Nationalism Mikel Lorenzo-Arza The removal of poet Antonio de Trueba's (1819–1889) mortal remains from Mallona Cemetery and their reburial at San Vicente Church was quite the occasion in 1920s Bilbao. The impact of the event was due to Trueba's importance in the history of the city, but no less to the Modernist swan sculpted by Mariano Benlliure (1819–1889) to adorn the new altar tomb (Díez Patón 93–108). Even after the closing ceremonies at Arriaga Theatre, it was the swan that lived on in the collective memory, as a subtle artistic reference to Antonio de Trueba's desire to embellish his fellow citizens' lives, much as the Pre-Raphaelite painters wished to do for their Victorian counterparts. Bilbao's industrialists shared the Victorians' economically liberal and socially conservative roots, as well as the desire to consolidate their "leisure class" status, to use Thomas Veblen's term for the founders of the mining emporia built in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution (1851–1890) (10). In its emulation of the aristocracy (25), Bilbao's industrial bourgeoisie needed to refine its economic power by acquiring artistic assets (25). Writer Vicente Arana (1848–1890), cousin to Sabino Arana Goiri (1865–1903), and Antonio de Trueba's foremost disciple, perceived their need for ennoblement. He depicted the pantheon of Basque regional literary heroes as a chivalrous world where industrialists could claim kinship with the parientes mayores and their traditions.1 He afforded them a repertoire of literary models through which to establish themselves as a distinct group during the Restoration (1876–1917). This article dissects Vicente Arana's broader project by analyzing his two Pre-Raphaelite novels, Jaun Zuría o el caudillo blanco (1887) and Leyendas del Norte [End Page 113] (1890), and their impact on the development of early Basque nationalism (1892–1900) (Juaristi, Bucle 12-389).2 The movement's founder, Sabino Arana, published Bizkaya por la independencia (1892) in a pre-Modernist atmosphere that flattered his initial conjectures about the "Nordic" ancestry of the Basque people and their need to extricate themselves from their Latin bondage.3 We suggest that Vicente Arana's novels played a paradoxical role in the aesthetic casting of the "Basque race" in that environment. On the one hand, the effeminate characters in Jaun Zuría o el caudillo blanco prompted Sabino Arana to call on Basques to protect their manliness and Nordic roots from Spanish "cripples;" and on the other hand, the Vikings in Leyendas del Norte, a compilation of a series of Icelander sagas, imbued the Nordic people, qua social engineering ideal, with a mythical dimension fueled by [End Page 114] Sabino Arana's nationalism. The message was that Basques should proceed with caution in their contact with the Spaniards immigrating to their country. The texts we will be dealing with come from these decades, years characterized by a series of changes that were to have a key impact on the culture medium where Modernism developed: industrialization, positivism and Marxism led to a bourgeois neo-idealism that sought to ward off shabbiness by enshrining aesthetic formulations from the past. Vicente Arana's novels heralded part of the Modernist desire to avoid vulgarity in everyday life. Sabino Arana's Basque nationalism, in turn, shared with Modernism the exaltation of indigenous features, charting a backward course to times long gone to reinstate a "paradise" eclipsed by the present. In Modernism, the desire to return to a legendary and/or historic past alternated with a kind of populism whose roots sank deep into the timelessness of the nation, an idea we could identify with the notion of intra-history put forward by Miguel de Unamuno in En torno al casticismo (1895). This article also explores the interrelationship between Catalonian nationalism and this same intellectual environment, which preluded what Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958) and José Nogales (1860–1908) christened "Modernism," and encouraged Basque and Catalonian nationalism to institute their racial projects. Víctor Balaguer's (1824–1901) Cuentos de mi tierra (1865), with its depiction of a vigorous, expanding Catalonian race, was linked to the later...