Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura by Leslie J. Harkema

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura by Leslie J. Harkema José Luis Venegas Harkema, Leslie J. Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth:From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura. U of Toronto P, 2017. 292 pp. Borges once described James Joyce as being "menos un literato que una literatura" (Borges, Obras completas 4 251). In the same spirit, Leslie Harkema's new book successfully demonstrates that Miguel de Unamuno is much more than just an iconic figure of the so-called Generation of 1898. Unveiling a neglected literary network between the venerable Rector of the University of Salamanca and the younger poets of the Generation of 1927, Harkema dispenses with the generational paradigm to map out the development of literary culture in early twentieth-century Spain. Youth as a literary, philosophical, and cultural idea bridges the gap between Unamuno's response to the hoary structures of Restoration Spain in the late 1800s and the avant-garde impulse that seized the intellectual elite gathered around Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes in the 1920s. In exploring the transmission of this idea, Harkema traces an arc connecting Unamuno, the Generation of 27 (known at the time as la joven literatura), and European modernism. Spanish modernism thus becomes the critical frame that repositions Unamuno and la joven literatura in a comparative and transnational context unencumbered by tired generational labels. In the introduction, Harkema considers the different meanings that youth took on in Spain and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Engaged with wider cultural contexts while never losing sight of Unamuno, she contends that in diverse, and sometimes contrasting ways, youth is a "lyrical state" through which Spanish modernists resist the chronological and linear understandings of modernity found in, for example, Hegel and the Bildungsroman (5). In a rich chapter one, [End Page 1022] Harkema develops these insights to show how Unamuno's key ideas regarding literary form, national identity, and historical development cannot be fully understood without an examination of his opinions about youth. His critique of progress and linear time hinge on key concepts such as intrahistoria, poesis, and pistis, which, Harkema explains, converge on the creative energy of youth and the rejection of rigid teleology and cold rationality. The following chapters analyze the reception of Unamuno's "poetics of youth" among a younger group of writers who cut their literary teeth at the Residencia de Estudiantes. Chapter two highlights the impact on this group of Unamuno's Ensayos, a selection of essays edited by the Residencia press in the mid-1910s. Harkema places José Moreno Villa, who helped edit this collection, in dialogue with Unamuno to offer a nuanced interpretation of the apolitical commitment to aesthetic purity that permeated the Residencia. Harkema stresses Unamuno's influence on Moreno Villa's El pasajero (1914) and other writings. Rather than ignoring the social and political conflicts that plagued Spanish and European society at the time, Moreno Villa, taking his cue from Unamuno, sublimates them into an abstract reflection on human existence, as well as on the tension between youthful vitality and impending mortality, creation and destruction, life and death. Moreno Villa represents the Residencia's insularity, but also the residentes' capacity to grapple with "the relationship between youth and art, and incorporate the perspective of the adolescent, that recent product of modernity, into their own artistic creation" (135). Chapter three elaborates on these insights by showing how Unamuno sparked the politicization of la joven literatura against the background of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923-30). A staunch critic of the regime, Unamuno went into exile but remained a point of reference for the younger poets who organized the three-hundredth anniversary of Góngora's death in 1927. His refusal to attend the event at the organizers' request has been interpreted as evidence of the rift between the older, politically-aware writer and the young aesthetes. Harkema challenges this view by arguing that Unamuno's poetic and political ideas, which cannot be divorced from the overarching notion of youth, "were very present in the younger writers' work, before and, increasingly, after 1927" (139). To substantiate this claim...