Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain's Loss of Empire (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain's Loss of Empire Alda Blanco Britt Arredondo, Christopher . Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain's Loss of Empire. SUNY P, 2005. 266 pages. In a bold and much needed revisionist critical move for Hispanism, Christopher Britt Arredondo forcefully argues in Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain's Loss of Empire that Hispanists should eliminate the use of the term "Generation of '98" in order to "clear the ground for an alternative understanding of the literary and intellectual culture of early twentieth-century Spain" (8). With this book Britt Arrendondo joins a growing and healthy tend within Hispanism of reformulating Spanish literary history, questioning the premises upon which it has been written to date, and problematizing the notion of "generation" as the favored way of classifying twentieth-century authors. Unlike previous scholars devoted to the study of the so-called "Generation of '98"—Ricardo Gullón and Inman Fox, for example—who were extremely critical of the term put into circulation by Azorín and yet, nevertheless, continued using it as a convenient way of referring to this disparate group of authors preoccupied, if not obsessed, by the decadence of Spain after the final loss of its colonial empire in 1898, Britt Arredondo completely rejects it because "in the form it had been handed down to the present, it reproduces the implicit assumptions concerning Spain's heroic and classical past that motivate the nationalist imperialism professed by Unamuno, Ganivet, Maeztu [and] Ortega" (12). His alternative is to propose the use of a critical category, Quixotism. By reconfiguring the literary terrain at the turn of the century through this category he hopes to "contribute to the modernization of a field of study that remains, to this day, unnecessarily constrained by the memory of its nationalist legacy" (vii). Thus, this study is meant to be a "counternarrative" in the "extranational," "antinationalist" tradition, a tradition that for Britt Arrendondo has been marginalized and silenced within Spanish culture and Hispanism, and which includes, among others, Blanco White, Américo Castro, Juan Goytisolo, and Eduardo Subirats" (180–81). In order to establish the term and the category of Quixotism, he dissolves the "Generation of '98," regroups several of its members (Ganivet, Unamuno, and Maeztu) into a new set which he links by what he deems to be their nationalist and imperialist thinking as articulated through the "iconographic association of [End Page 87] the Spanish nation with the figure of Don Quixote" (6), and incorporates Ortega into his new critical category. Because the dual purpose in this book is "to expose the intellectual roots of Spanish fascist culture" (vii), which for him originates in the thinking and writing of Unamuno, Ganivet, Maeztu, and Ortega, and "denounce the complicity of certain scholars with that culture" (vii), he sets out to prove the four main arguments around which he organizes his study. Given the novelty of Britt Arredondo's approach to the study of turn-of-the-century meditations upon the "problem of Spain" and his introduction of Quixotism as a new critical category, I believe it is important to quote from the text rather than to gloss or summarize it. His first argument is that "the Quixotism proposed by these thinkers extols obsessive devotion to utopian ideals as a solemn, dignified, and virtuous habit of mind. Quixotic behavior [. . .] is a sign of nobility. Fittingly, the Quixotism of Ganivet, Unamuno, Maeztu, and Ortega constitutes an attempt to recuperate, if not altogether reinvent, Don Quixote as a sometimes stoic and mystical, sometimes redemptive and messianic hero who embodies the leadership ideals that these intellectuals believed could regenerate post-1898 Spain" (12–13). Secondly, he argues that "[r]ather than promote a critical understanding of the historical events that had led to Spain's demise as a world power, they set out to deny that their nation's loss of empire was irrevocable" (13). His third claim is that these thinkers "produced conjectural national histories that presented the 'true' history of the Spanish nation's decline from empire as 'false.' Against this background of 'false historical reality' they affirmed their own 'truer' versions of the nation's 'essential history.' According to these...