Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling by Jo Labanyi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling by Jo Labanyi Richard Cleminson Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling. By Jo Labanyi. (Selected Essay, 11) Cambridge: Legenda. 2019. xii+349 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–78188–932–9. The great advantage of the Legenda 'Selected Essays' series is the combination in one volume of a set of prodigious works by highly influential authors such as Jo Labanyi. The task for the reviewer is, consequently, a somewhat daunting one, however satisfying the reading of the individual chapters may be. This book, set out in six parts and containing previously published essays, constitutes a key contribution to Spanish Cultural and Literary Studies. Running through the collection is the author's attention to 'structures of feeling', drawing on Raymond Williams's notion, as a driver and explanatory resource for the comprehension of a diverse array of cultural production primarily from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part I focuses on romanticism; Part II on the realist novel and art; and the remaining parts centre on the twentieth century, with the final sections on historical memory. The first chapter, originally published in the Hispanic Research Journal in 2004, addresses the understudied (and nowadays rarely taught, at least in British universities) eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century in order to reconsider the contribution made to European discourses on modernization and romantic love by literary production from the period. In a deft reappraisal of works by the Spanish Romantics who turned to the medieval period, Labanyi argues for the interconnectedness of Spain with European representations of love, thereby disrupting the [End Page 269] 'primitive' and anti-modern stereotypes foisted on Spain by less careful observers. Rather than rigid categories and set characteristics, Labanyi invites the reader to consider the unruly influence of alternative expressions of subjectivity by engaging in a kind of historical 'border studies' 'that tries to think across the historical "divides" produced by established schemes of periodization' (p. 11). Coupled with the identification of the structures of feeling manifested in alternative stories and readings, this borderland subjectivity perused against the grain forms the hilo conductor of Labanyi's book. The romanticized versions of love, drawn on an Arabic past, provide 'the basis for future models of the nation' (p. 15). Nation-forming was also influenced by the representation of important moments from the past or instances of daily life as events around which to coalesce and expose 'the public to representations of the past organized in a particular way', thereby schooling the public 'in modes of viewing appropriate to modern citizens' (p. 88) and emphasizing the generative force of painting in constructions of feeling and identity in the present (Chapter 8 in Part II). Novels and films are other sources of (re)presentation of images in the early twentieth century and under the Franco regime. Drawing on work by Klaus Theweleit on the genesis of the 'fascist character' in men, the chapter on Giménez Caballero's Genio de España (1932) shows how the author drew on a version of modernism that was defined by an appeal to the irrational, 'allowing it to reach the masses by speaking to the unconscious' (p. 122). Such an interpretation permits Labanyi to complicate the acceptance of certain traits of modernism by both left and right rather than assume an implicit anti-modernism on the part of Spanish fascists. Caballero's writings and speeches were ingrained with gendered aspects and the fear of the loss of unity, whether by means of the republican divorce law of 1932 or the separation of Catalonia from Spain. Rather than rejecting or eschewing the Jewish contribution to Hispanic civilization, his desire was to incorporate said contribution(s) into Spain's imperial history just as other races had been dissolved by Spanish males into the broader imperial project begun centuries before. The wide-ranging Chapter 11 on commonalities and differences between Maeztu, Giménez Caballero, and Madariaga as well as their usages of Don Juan and romantic love to prop up their own political visions is, alongside the first chapter on Arabic love and the last chapters on the intricacies of...