Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain
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Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain
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Overview
Choosing two historical moments of sweeping material and cultural change in Spanish history, Sieburth reads two novels from the 1880s (by Benito Pérez Galdós) and two from the 1970s (by Juan Goytisolo and Carmen Martín Gaite) as fictional theories about the impact of modernity on culture and politics. Her analysis reveals that the high/low division in the cultural sphere reinforces other kinds of separations—between social classes or between men and women—dear to the elite but endangered by progress. This tension, she shows, is particularly evident in Spain, where modernization has been a contradictory and uneven process, rarely accompanied by political freedom, and where consumerism and mass culture coexist uneasily with older ways of life.
Weaving together a wide spectrum of diverse material, her work will be of interest to readers concerned with Spanish history and literature, literary theory, popular culture, and the relations between politics, economics, gender, and the novel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822397052 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 616 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Inventing High and Low
Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain
By Stephanie Sieburth
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1994 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9705-2
CHAPTER 1
Modernity and Narration in Galdós's La desheredada
... The Spanish novel of the 1880s is in many respects a confrontation with modernity, a meditation on the significance of the vast transformations that have taken place in the previous decades. These include the rapid industrialization of the modern city, the increased access of the masses to political equality, and the spread of mass-produced cultural artifacts such as the newspaper serial, the lithograph, and photography. These cultural newcomers competed with the art and literature which considered themselves "serious," irreversibly modifying relationships among different kinds of cultural production and between each text and its audience. Pérez Galdós's La desheredada (1881) opens the decade with a thorough, complex, and anguished meditation on these questions. I will focus here on the novel's narrator, who attempts to carve out a place for his art in the new modern context, and who is involved in a search for artistic identity which parallels the search of his protagonist for confirmation of her lineage. This chapter and the one that follows will put forth a metareading of La desheredada's plot and narratorial discourse as a reflection on the role of art in the modern age. In order to understand the text's polemic on art, however, a brief overview of the social, economic, and cultural changes in Madrid will be crucial. The narrator's own myth of modernity is created in response to these changes, and it leads him to search for ways in which art can maintain its distinction under the new conditions.
The most salient change in Madrid in the decades preceding La desheredada was without doubt the growth of its population. In 1840, it had 160,000 inhabitants. By 1885, the population had more than doubled to reach 400,000. Territorial expansion had not taken place in proportion to this rapid rise in population, so the size of the crowd in the streets was unprecedented (Pla 12ff.). But who were the new immigrants to the capital? Most had come from rural areas of the country in search of work. But the city had not industrialized sufficiently to employ all of them. They lived in crowded conditions in slums on the city fringes; some would become criminals, others prostitutes, for lack of alternatives (Díez de Baldeón 118ff.; Cuevas 168ff.). The evident fascination with crowds in La desheredada is inseparable from anxiety about the working class.
Politically, Spain had undergone many changes of regime in the years preceding the writing of La desheredada. In 1868, Isabel II was dethroned in an attempt at bourgeois revolution. Two years of rule by a revolutionary junta were followed by the importation of a foreign monarch, Amadeo de Saboya, in 1871; he would abdicate after only two years. A short-lived Republic (1873–74) was put to rest by a military coup, which inaugurated the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in the person of Alfonso XII, Isabel's son. The first part of La desheredada takes place during the reign of Amadeo and ends as the Republic is declared. The question of political equality is in the air. The Restoration, however, will be characterized by a pact between the bourgeoisie and the nobility which puts an end to bourgeois revolution by allowing the financial bourgeoisie more administrative power and freedom, but which maintains many Old Regime structures intact. Peace is achieved by sacrificing true democracy; elections are rigged so that conservatives and liberals alternate in power, a procedure known as the turno pacífico.
The intolerable living conditions of the working classes had led to their radicalization and organization, especially after the International was established in Spain in 1870. Many proletarian newspapers came into being, taking advantage of the liberal press policies of the years 1868–74 (Seoane; Valls). Following a period of enforced clandestinity in the early years of the Restoration, the Socialist party was founded in 1879. The anarchists were able to emerge from clandestinity in 1881, the year La desheredada was published; but in the preceding years, they had come out with increasingly radical pronouncements. Individuals influenced by anarchist doctrine and by the international climate of violenceacross Europe set off bombs and attempted assassinations of public figures. Two attempts were made on the life of King Alfonso XII, in 1878 and 1879. While these actions were not really the result of a coherent policy of the Madrid anarchist federation, they were taken as such by the government and the bourgeoisie (Gutiérrez Sánchez 107). The Spanish bourgeoisie of the 1870s thought and wrote much about the working class, proposing building projects to better its living conditions. They were conscious that simple repression of working class demands would only lend the workers moral authority and attract more of them to their political organizations (Díez de Baldeón 118–19). Yet the bourgeoisie lacked the will to actually put reforms into practice. During the Restoration, the upper classes founded hospices and soup kitchens, which did nothing to change the precarious living conditions of the poor (Díez de Baldeón 134). The bourgeoisie's ambivalence between recognition of untenable conditions and unwillingness to sacrifice its own financial resources informs the discourse of the narrator of La desheredada.
Technological progress was also rapid after 1850. Railways were connecting the country beginning in the 1850s; tram cars began to run from the Puerta del Sol to Salamanca's rich new neighborhood in 1871. A telegraph agency was established in 1865, making international events rapidly accessible. New print technology made rapid reproduction possible, and illustrations appeared in the newspapers in the 1860s; advertising would follow in the 1870s. (Photography had entered the country in the 1840s.) Twenty-eight daily papers were sold in Madrid in 1874; by the mid-1880s there were fifty-two (Díaz 370). The means of photographic reproduction were perfected, so that beginning in the 1870s, illustrated magazines proliferated in Spain as well as the rest of Europe; they featured duplications of famous art works.
Despite the lack of new schools and the consequent stagnation in literacy rates relative to other countries, important changes in the Spanish population's access to culture and information had been occurring throughout the century, especially after 1850. The pitifully small circle of erudite noble and bourgeois readers, which formed the public of the literary journals during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was broadened by the bourgeois newspapers in the years following the death of the absolutist king, Fernando VII, in 1833. The political news required less erudition than the literary journals, so that the newspaper was able to serve as a mediator between the educated few and the literate but less-cultivated middle class (Fontanella, ch. 1).
With the death of Fernando VII came greater freedom of the press, but only a small public was prepared to greet it; a larger public would have to be created by the press itself. An audience for information was increased in several ways. The oral tradition of storytelling, very much alive in Spain, took on a new function in the collective reading of newspapers, both in reading rooms and in town squares. The press took on aspects of the popular broadsheets traditionally sold and recited by blind men, which recounted sensationalist pieces of news. After 1850, illustrations and caricatures in the press narrowed the gap between written text and uneducated reader.
But it was the serial novel which perhaps did most to provide an introduction to reading for the rather impoverished petty bourgeois stratum of society. Members of this nebulous social class were high enough on the social ladder to identify with and aspire to the status that came with bourgeois culture. But they could ill afford the costly purchase of an entire book from a bookstore, and their lack of experience in reading made access to classic, "highbrow" literature difficult at best. Jean-François Botrel has shown how the serial novel addressed the needs of a class in its literary infancy. First, the advertising for new serials stressed simultaneously the low cost of subscription and the beauty and luxurious appearance of the edition, which could be bound once all episodes were collected; the aspiring petty bourgeois who fetishized the appearance of the leather-bound book was thus assured that he would share in the experience of owning one. Next, by offering short, weekly episodes with suspenseful endings, a public was created which had a need to consume reading matter regularly. Finally, several strategies facilitated the new reader's first efforts at comprehension. Illustrations, a residual element of oral culture, regularly summarized key moments in the action. Large print, widely spaced, shows the serials' preoccupation with an audience which had only recently learned to read. All elements of the reading experience were fragmented into easily digested chunks—spaces between words, short sentences, frequent new paragraphs, and the short length of the episode all ensured the novice ample opportunity for "rest stops" during the reading.
The serial novels were at their most popular during the years 1850–70. Although the number of serials published was small relative to the number of total publications in those years, the editions were exceptionally large. Botrel estimates that 800,000 to a million people (a quarter of the literate population) might have read weekly serials in 1868. The readership was predominantly urban, with an increasing proportion of women, who in the cities were relatively well off and forcibly idle. Thus, while the national percentage of literate women in Spain was only 9 percent in 1860, it was 37 percent in Madrid; by 1877, it had grown to 47 percent (15 percent nationally).
Factors such as those outlined above should put us on guard when we read the complaints of the writers of the day against the low cultural level being propagated by the serial novel. Rather, such mass-produced products provided a training ground where those of limited income and recently acquired reading skills could develop a taste for cultural consumption; after 1870, this public would turn its attention more and more to the (highbrow) novels written by Galdós and others. Thus, the distinction which "highbrow" writers might want to make between the readers of their texts and the readers of sensationalist serials would not necessarily hold water.
Now that we have surprised Spain in its uneasy moment of transition to modernity, where old and new social structures overlap, where crowds teem in Madrid as never before, where culture is changing its social base and machines flood the market with ever-new, mass-produced objects, we can understand why images of fragmentation, uniformity, and unbridled reproduction recur obsessively in the discourse of La desheredada's narrator. Modernity is associated with the dizzying proliferation of objects, papers, numbers, words, and even people. The fear that these quantities will become uncontrollable is just below the surface of the description, and sometimes is even made explicit. Madrid at Christmas, for example, is an "insane asylum on the loose," where pedestrian traffic triples, and fish stores inundate the capital with every fish ever created (1062, italics mine). Texts whose referents cannot be found proliferate wildly—"grandiose paper monuments" (1030) are generated by commissions about reform schools which are never built. Endless laws, regulations, and recommendations are signed by that bureaucratic "machine," Manuel Pez, Joaquín Pez's powerful administrator father. The marquesa's daughter writes delirious letters in which illegible scribbles give way to the demented repetition of a single word. Crazy statistics and calculations abound. Dizzying columns of numbers rise and fall in the margins of the map of Spain in the asylum. Isidora's unemployed godfather keeps voluminous tomes of accounts for a family whose finances are nonexistent. Even scarier is that the people who produce paper monuments and statistics are themselves prone to multiply. Don Manuel Pez occupies a high administrative post and gives jobs to his numerous relatives in all of Spain. The Pez family follows the biblical injunction quoted by the narrator: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas" (1053). The number of "fishes" in the ministries of Spain "was such that it could never be counted" (1054), and it is what exceeds calculation that terrifies the narrator.
The tendency of a single figure to multiply into many is analogous to another obsessive tendency in the text, in which a single object falls into fragments, particles, or ruins. If, in modern Spain, the unique is reproduced in many copies, in the old Spain which coexists with it, everything is falling into ruins; thus fragmentation, for the Spaniard, is inescapable. In the squalor of the poor, southern quarter of Madrid, the houses fall to pieces:
Todo es allí vejez, polilla; todo está a punto de desquiciarse y caer. Es una ciudad movediza compuesta de ruinas. (1025)
Everything there is old and moth-eaten; everything is about to crumble and fall. It is a city that wavers, cobbled together from ruins.
In the rich quarter, the situation is much the same. Death and decay pervade the Aransis palace. The marquesa examines for the first time in nine years the room where her daughter met her death. The flowers of nine years earlier are disintegrating into particles, and the daughter's clothes, "invaded" by death, are about to do the same (1044). Efforts to realize wholeness in this novel have a similar fate; Mariano comes home with his new suit in tatters (1069), and Isidora's dreams are "shredded" (despedazadas) (1078).
Opposite to this tendency of the one to fragment into the many, and equally alarming to the narrator, is the creation of uniformity out of diversity. As the many melt into one undifferentiated mass or into identical units, individuality is threatened. The fear, of course, has a class basis; the idea of equality threatens to engulf distinction. Soon even beggar women will be wearing hats, says the narrator: "With the growth of industry and off-the-rack clothing, Humanity is on its way to being either uniformly elegant or uniformly tacky" (1039). Uniformity is often achieved by machine in the novel. We first see Mariano at work in a rope factory, where thousands of filaments are described as being mercilessly twisted and tortured until they form one, uniform piece of rope. Human beings often act with the regularity of machines in the text. The secretary at the insane asylum writes with such uniform, regular characters that the narrator calls him a "writing machine" (991). The fact that this man will later have a crazed fit and turn out to be mad only indicates the dangerous ease with which extreme order can give way to disorder and fragmentation.
The narrator's fear is a common one in this period of transition to modernity—the fear of losing oneself in a chaotic world. His natural response is to cling to the use of reason as a tool to bring under control what seems too large, too fragmented, too multiple. By describing reality, by penetrating behind appearances and weighing what is really there, he attempts to defend himself against this fear. He will advise his characters to exercise a similar prudence—to trust only what possesses some consistency, to calculate carefully what is real. Such positivism translates into a conservative ideology in which characters who do not want more than they have are rewarded with happiness. The ideology is borne out in a few minor characters who embody this ideal. One is the concierge of the Aransis palace, who, despite possessing substantial savings and an inheritance, lives in a modest nook in the corner of the palace and never abandons the humble position of concierge. He is always happy, active, and occupied. The other is Emilia Relimpio, who abandons cursi social climbing, marries a modest orthopedist, abandons all pretension, and is completely content in her domestic routine.
So the narrator preaches looking beyond appearances to an underlying reality, and thus retaining control (of life, of art). But several features of modern society conspire to render this attempt to penetrate appearances impossible. Most important among these is the entry of the masses into public life, which has enormous consequences for artistic representation. I will focus here not on the working class (also important in the novel) but on the formation of the petty bourgeois class of shop clerks that accompanies capitalist industrialization. T. J. Clark calls the emergence of this class one of the main determining circumstances of the art of the period. Clark has eloquently described the indignation of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie when petty bourgeois storekeepers started taking the same Sunday outings to the country as the former had always done (Clark, ch. 3). The anxiety produced by this new class of indeterminate contours was acute; it was a sector with no culture of its own, given to ideas above or below its station (Clark 236). And, owing to changes in economic structure, it was mobile, although by no means sure of its position. Since it is this class which identifies with the culture and commodities enjoyed by its "betters," it poses the most immediate challenge to the latter's lifestyle and worldview, and it becomes something of an obsession with the writers of the day.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Inventing High and Low by Stephanie Sieburth. Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Note on the Translations,
Introduction: The High/Low Opposition and the Spanish Novel,
Chapter One: Modernity and Narration in Galdós's La Desheredada,
Chapter Two: Separate and Unequal: Literature's Polemic Against Mass Culture in La Desheredada,
Chapter Three: Fusion of Genres, Distinction of Genders: A Recipe for Partial Social Change in Galdós's Tormento,
Chapter Four: Apocalypse Again: Mass Culture, Misogyny, and the Canon in Goytisolo's Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián,
Chapter Five: Beyond High and Low: Carmen Martín Gaite's El Cuarto de Atrás,
Chapter Six: Martín Gaite, Galdós, Goytisolo: Dialogues on the Role of Culture,
Conclusion: Uneven Modernization and the Conditions of Emergence of the Spanish Mass Cultural Novel,
Appendix: Plot Summaries,
Bibliography,
Index,
About the Author,